


Duets in a Dark Room

by Shegry



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Music, F/F, M/M, Slow Build, everybody is a musician basically
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2015-04-19
Packaged: 2018-02-28 08:37:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 40,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2725856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shegry/pseuds/Shegry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The oboist’s entire expression changes into that of sunshine and enthusiasm, like it was on that first day in the music room, when he emanated like the bright oranges of fall, because that’s how Hinata is, like the cherry blossoms that bloom in the spring and the leaves that fall off months later, his fervor is beautiful but fragile; just a shift and it’s gone.</p><p>When he looks to Kageyama then, it’s with an eagerness that makes the cellist want to start before it disappears, like the pink petals of seasonal flowers in the spring, and colored leaves that will soon be buried in the first snow of winter, and so he starts before the wind can pluck those petals from their stems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Of Late Night Rehearsals and Orange Sunshine

Music, art for the ear composed of notes that are arranged in a way that is pleasing to the listener; performed by a musician who spends their time learning fingerings and memorizing rhythms. People like to discourage musicians by saying performing is a dead-end occupation.

A bow across a string, a steady stream of breath, quick presses on keys, or a collision with a drumhead are all it takes for somebody to make music, but a musician knows in reality it’s more complicated than just that. Training for years is expected, practice is mandatory, and even then people may not find it in themselves to care unless your name has been traced worldwide. Short bursts of passion are followed by even shorter bursts of applause and another eternity with a new piece of music, a never-ending cycle that’s altogether frustrating, tiring, and enjoyable.

Some instruments are famous for their ability to stand alone in a performance, like the piano, while others are known for their popularity, such as violin and flute; instruments like the cello have a rich and irresistible sound that turns heads. When two or more instruments play together, their sounds are amplified and exaggerated. The sounds become less raw but remain just as exposed, just as individualized.

Music is the backbone of everything. It dwells in car radios and shopping malls, in commercials and movies, in the showers of otherwise empty homes and in iPods and phones that can travel miles on a single song. Often it lies in the background of events happening center stage, but when the curtains open and the lights dim, the musicians get their opportunity to prove to their importance to the audience.

As the doors shut in the back of the auditorium, leaving an echo of wood and metal to right throughout the hall, the lights begin to dim and voices settle. The creak of folding theater seats ring in the open expanse of the room until it’s interrupted by applause as the last set of performers enter the stage. Intermission is over, and the show will resume.

Beethoven; Trio For Piano, Violin And Cello In D Major; Op.70, No.1. “Ghost.” It is a piece composed of three movements and played by a group of three experienced musicians. Sugawara Koushi, second year pianist, Azumane Asahi, second year cellist, and Nishinoya Yuu, first year violinist, have spent months preparing this piece for their spring performance.

Movement I, Allegro vivace e con brio; a quick-paced movement that begins in a fast unison, followed by a section where the melody seems to jump between the cello and violin. Steady and experienced hands keep time on the black and white keys behind them, playing their own melody. The piece slips back into unison for a phrase, and the three musicians look to each other with grins on their faces and a passion for their piece. They’ve fallen into a good rhythm, and are able to play with all of their ability.

Suga’s deft hands glide across the piano’s keys, following the experience and practice that he had put into them. Nishinoya’s eyes glint with a tinge of excitement that he leaves solely for the stage, keeping the others fired up even in the sustained passages of their brisk allegro. Asahi’s tone is mellow and fits nicely with the higher pitch of the violin, the low and full tone of the cello fitting like the final piece of a puzzle, letting the other sounds wrap around it and becoming one with the rest of the ensemble. As themes in the piece repeat and are re-articulated, the trio gets more confident, more at ease being in the bright lights of the stage. The crowd is less intimidating in the pitch blackness of the auditorium seating, even though that means every nuance or movement of the players is bolded, but the three students have seen each other so often in the course of the past couple months that every flick of the wrist and sway of their bodies in the heat of the music is familiar, etched into their memories like the piece itself.

Aggressive movements and confident sound sets the mood for the end of the first movement, while Suga, Nishinoya, and Asahi’s expressions are all reflective of one another; they look to each other for reassurance and clarification as they push the last unison section out in perfect synchronization. The mood changes almost instantly at the end of the first movement.

Movement II, Largo assai ed espressivo; a movement defined by its slower tempo and prime opportunity for the musicians to express emotion. At the start of the movement, the two string players outline the pianist’s melody with chords; the violin and cello create a sound that is contrasting, yet unified. Suga’s hands move easily over the notes, pressing with gentle certainty. The notes flow evenly into each other as the pianist maintains a tempo that seems to push forward even as it holds back. Soon enough, the melody begins to flow between the three of them like a river that has been alive for centuries. Though the piece is in D major, the color of the notes though the second movement suggest something of a darker nature. The melancholy chords of the cello and violin become the forefront of the piece. While most sections remain mezzo piano, the persistent pounding of forte phrases seem even more articulated, more intense, and overall more dramatic when the dynamics are brought back to a faint whisper through the music.

The expression lies not only in the music itself for the second movement, however. The body language of the musicians producing those sounds stand out just as vibrantly in those blinding stage lights, and causes the true intent of the piece to reach the audience. Though their expressions are intense, it’s different than the intensity given off by athletes during a match or heavy gazes between lovers. The musicians’ eyes are alight with something else, a passion for their craft that can’t be matched by those who haven’t felt the vibrations of their music travel through their fingertips. Music is the outlet that allows the musicians to release their emotions; it is an outlet that, once refined, can be used to express anything that the player wishes for it to. Chords dripping with these emotions are what make the second movement what it was written to be: largo assai ed espressivo - very wide and expressive.

Movement III, Presto; the final movement to a piece of sentiment and fervor, a movement that seems almost rushed yet still retains a sense of balance. It is a movement of passing melodies and quick riffs that fly by in an instant if they aren’t appreciated the moment they appear. The students’ drive has returned with all of the excitement as the first movement. They set an exciting and fiery pace, one they’d used countless times in the practice rooms of the school building and in bedrooms and park pathways and in their heads as they hummed it on the way home.

Nishinoya and Asahi grin at each other as the measures keep flying by with the accuracy they had trained for, and Suga keeps them going with swift presses to piano keys and an unshakable smile on his face.

The smile is unshakable until about halfway through their final movement, when Asahi misses his note and falls behind a beat. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before, they’d planned for a slip up like this to happen; the problem is that this time Suga tries to fix it. In the pressure of the performance Suga tries to slow down enough for Asahi to get back on track, which would work if Asahi hadn’t already skipped ahead a beat while Noya continues as he is, trusting that Asahi will be able to fix it on his own like he had during rehearsals. But Suga isn’t thinking, and he tries to fix it, and the three of them fall out of sync.

There is dissonance and anxiety running high through the stage as the trio tries to get themselves back together, and while rhythms and pitches fail to match up Nishinoya chooses to hold his own, keeps going where he is, and lets the other two eventually find their places This works once they figure out how to right themselves, but then the piece is over. Though the last few measures felt good, the ones previous still weigh heavy on their thoughts. Their faces tell each other that they’re all thinking the same thing, and as they all stand to bow, the audience seems conflicted as well. The piece is a decent length, about 25 minutes long, and the part of it that’s sitting with everybody in the auditorium is the ending. They get the roaring applause they’d been hoping for, but they can all tell.

They can tell that the audience was expecting a big finish, though the one they received was fairly different than what they had been hoping for.

Suga, Nishinoya, and Asahi’s performance had been one of spectacular emotion and intensity up until the very end, and as they all bow and walk off the stage, hands still clapping as they walk through the stage doors, the three of them know that their last performance of the school year will sit like lead on their shoulders for a long time to follow.

 

* * *

 

“You got the list, right?”

“Yep,” Daichi confirms, hands in his pockets as he and Suga walk down the school hallway toward the music wing. “Looks like only four first years are interested in continuing, though.”

He looks out the passing windows and sighs, and Suga can’t control his own defeated expression, staring down at his feet and watching the light from the windows as it enters and leaves his path. “That’s even less than last year,” he mutters.

“Well, with any luck they’ll stick around. We can use all the members we can get.” Suga nods in agreement and Daichi hands him the list, and as he looks it over the two of them hear a very loud flutist by the name of Tanaka Ryuunosuke approaching from behind. He catches up to the duo in no time and pushes himself over Suga’s shoulder to read the list in his hand.

“Are those the new members? Gimme that,” he says with a grin and snatches the sheet out of the pianist’s hands. “Only four? That’s a bummer.” Suga just rolls his eyes and lets him look over the sheet; they’ll be meeting the first years soon, anyway.

As the three of them get closer to the main music room, used mostly for meetings and larger rehearsals, they hear a faint sound coming from the room; they hadn’t expected anybody to already be using the room for practice, it was only the first day of the school year, after all. The two third year musicians look at each other questioningly before Tanaka pushes between them and opens the door himself, and what they hear once they step in is the dark tone of a cello.

“Bach’s Toccata?” Daichi inquires softly, and they stand in the doorway as the student continues. The sound is experienced and mature, a full sound that gives the impression of countless hours of practicing and instruction.

He’s a prodigy, they think; the cellist is playing the fugue with such precision, skillfully playing two notes with the angle of his bow and making the music that much more rich. It sounds like it was meant to be played on his cello.

The others can do nothing but stand and listen as he plays, not realizing that they had entered and being so wrapped up in his music that he makes it to the end without interruption. It takes Tanaka’s cough at the end to alert him to the three who had just witnessed his private performance, and when he sees them there he nods. “Hey.”

The upperclassman finally approach the first year as he places his cello in the case beside him and stands to talk with them (Suga hadn’t thought the cellist would be so tall and in all honestly would prefer that he sit back down).

Daichi, who had reclaimed the new member list, was the first to address him. “You must be Kageyama Tobio.” The cellist nods and the others smile in greeting. “I’m Sawamura Daichi, but you can just call me Daichi, everyone else does. I’m the club president and I play clarinet.” Kageyama gives another nod. “That’s Sugawara Koushi, third year and our pianist, and Tanaka Ryuunosuke, second year flutist.”

Tanaka puffs up his chest in pride and Suga offers him a welcoming smile. “You can call me Suga.”

“I’m… obviously a cellist,” Kageyama says a bit dumbly, but he isn’t really sure what else he can add to the conversation. He was never really good with introductions, preferring to simply answer whatever is asked of him; everything goes a lot smoother that way. While he waits for some kind of continuation, he can’t help but notice the air of familiarity between the three upperclassman.

“How long have you been playing?” comes the voice of the pianist, and Kageyama thinks he might hear the door open, but he ignores it. The others don’t seem to hear it, either.

“Since I was four,” he responds and the three look amazed by his answer. Kageyama had been playing since he was big enough to do so. “I started taking private lessons about the same time.”

“Are you like some kind of genius?” Tanaka asks, and though Daichi knows there isn’t any malice behind it, he wants to smack him over the head for saying it.

“Excuse me!”

The four of them all stop at the sound of a voice, and turn to see wild orange hair, a frustrated face, and a small case clasped tight in the boy’s hand. Once he realizes he has four startled musicians staring at him, he composes himself and stands tall - well, as tall as he can.

“My name is Hinata Shouyou and I’m a first year. I play the oboe, and I want to be a chamber musician.” Kageyama all but scoffs at him.

Daichi looks over the list he was given that morning to confirm that the enthusiastic boy with the fiery hair was, indeed, on the member list, and he’s about to say something when Hinata cuts in instead. “You!” he all but shouts, pointing a finger at the tall boy with black hair behind the group of upperclassman. “I feel like I know you from somewhere.”

Kageyama just raises an eyebrow at him, and mutters something along the lines of, “As if.”

“No,” Hinata continues, and the other three students seem forgotten as he directs the entirety of his attention on the cellist, “I’ve heard you play before, in the park. You were amazing, some of the people who were watching called you the ‘Grand Maestro of the Stage.’”

Something seemed to snap in Kageyama then, and he stepped forward, towering over the smaller boy, and narrowed his eyes dangerously. “Don’t call me that,” he said with a growl in his voice, and Hinata seemed helpless in his presence; it was overwhelming and frightening to say the least.

“Why not? It sounds like such a cool name.” Hinata ignores Kageyama’s persistent glare in favor of pressing him for more information. “I heard you say you take lessons. That’s so cool!” The cellist could feel his patience running dry.

“What do you mean ‘that’s so cool?’ Taking lessons is expected, they’re a necessity. You can’t become a good player if you don’t train under somebody.” He’s met with a blank stare.

“I’m a self-taught musician, though. I’ll become better than you if it means proving you wrong.”

“Are you kidding? There’s no way you’d become better than me. I’ve been doing this all my life.”

“This isn’t the time to be fighting,” Daichi says, but it’s lost to the other boys.

“You’ll see, just because I don’t have a teacher doesn’t mean I can’t be as good as you.”

“Except that it does, and there’s no way you’ll ever surpass me.”

“Oh yeah? Watch me then!” Hinata kneels on the floor, placing his instrument case hastily down in front of him and pulling out a reed and placing it in his mouth as he assembles his oboe. Kageyama watches him from above, interested in him only because he’s sure that Hinata’s ability doesn’t come close to his own. To the side of the two-man showdown, Daichi looks like he’s about to yell again, but Suga puts a hand on his shoulder and shakes his head.

“Let him play. I’m a little curious, aren’t you?” Suga’s voice is quiet behind the clatter of metal clasps and keys, and Daichi can’t help but admit that he too wants to hear what the little oboist is made of. Tanaka has already taken to placing himself in one of the chairs off to the side and observing the pair. The third years are surprised he hasn’t cut into the first years’ heated conversation yet.

Hinata stands with his assembled instrument, pulling the reed out of his mouth and placing it into the top and taking on a stance that he deems correct for performing, and takes one breath to calm himself, one as he raises the instrument to his lips, and then one right before he starts playing.

Smetana’s Moldau, written to showcase the beauty of the Vltava River as it flows from the Bohemian forest to Prague. The notes flow like the water it was meant to symbolize, rolling over each other like the fluid motion of water jumping over rocks at dusk when the moon makes the ripples shine. It’s intense like the waterfalls that send rocks crashing down into calmer lake beds, and dramatic like sharp turns and catastrophes.

Hinata’s Moldau sounds like autumn after the leaves fall and the sun shines through empty branches and onto them. It sounds melancholy and drips with enthusiasm for a piece developed in a lonely bedroom and mastered over time. The group can only stop and watch as he performs the main theme of the piece, the melody embodying minor chords and bass tones, as his hair falls in front of his closed eyes because he’s swaying with his music, as he plays with incredible support and impressive vibrato, and as he completely blows away any doubts the other students had for this oboe player who had yelled for their attention.

After playing a couple phrases, he stops and takes a couple deep breaths to catch himself, and his eyes are shining with a staggering sense of accomplishment. It takes Tanaka a moment to realize that his mouth has been hanging open, and the third years need to snap out of their own amazement before they begin clapping for him. Hinata gives a triumphant bow and shoots Kageyama a grin as he stands, one that makes the cellist dig nail marks into his hands as they’re clutched tightly at his sides.

“Where in the world did you learn that?” Kageyama demands (cutting off Tanaka, who was about to fawn over the small performance), getting into the shorter boy’s face with a sneer, but the effort is quickly thwarted because he leans down to put his oboe back in its case.

“I taught myself,” Hinata replies, and it sounds so nonchalant that it makes Kageyama fume that much more. “I learned all the fingerings for the notes, and then I started listening to music, and then I learned it.”

“Let me get this straight,” Kageyama starts with narrowed eyes, “you learned the Moldau… by ear.”

“I guess so. It was kinda just like,” the oboist starts as he closes his case and stands up, and then he makes a jumble of hand movements that make no sense to anybody in the room except for Hinata, and then he just shrugs.

“I can’t believe you. There’s a lot of time and dedication that goes into being a good musician, and what have you been doing? Sitting by yourself and learning music by ear?” He won’t admit that Hinata’s tone is impressive. “What’s the point if you’re going to do everything half-assed?”

Tanaka looks like he could knock all of the taller boy’s teeth square out of his face, so Daichi holds out a hand and speaks up in his place. “Cut it out, you two, this isn’t the-”

“I worked hard to get where I am!” Hinata breaks in, all wide-eyed fury and frustration.

“What a joke. You can barely call yourself a musician.”

“Guys-”

“I just played didn’t I? That was music! I am a musician.”

“Have you ever even touched a piece of sheet music?”

“Well, I-”

“And what about playing with other people, huh? Have you ever done that?”

“No, but-”

“Guys,” comes a low voice, and the air in the room suddenly runs cold as Daichi stands between them, all broad shoulders and dark aura, and the first years shrink back. Even the other two upperclassmen know well enough to take a few steps toward the back of the room.

“If you two are going to bicker like children instead of get along with each other, how do you expect to join this club?” The two first years look at each other anxiously. “If you want me to accept your forms, you better get your asses in gear and act like you have what it takes to play with others,” Daichi finishes, and he turns to head into a room connected to the main one they’re standing in.

While Daichi ruffles through cabinets, Suga and Tanaka rejoin the two younger students. “I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced,” Suga says to a still-frightened Hinata, and gives him a smile, born of sincerity, that seems to make the boy relax a bit more. “You can call me Suga, I’m a pianist; this is Tanaka, our flute player, and Daichi is our group president. He plays clarinet.” Hinata nods excitedly, and then the door off to the side is being closed, and said clarinetist is holding sheets of music in his hands.

“You two,” he asserts, pushing the music into the first years’ hands, “are going to learn this piece and perform it for the club next week.”

“This is…” Kageyama starts, timidly, looking over the music and then glancing over to the other boy’s hands, where the label “OBOE” is written, “This is an oboe and cello duet?”

Tanaka moves to stand behind the two to read the name of the piece they’d been handed. “Oh, Piazzolla's Historie Du Tango.”

Suga smiles, mostly to himself, and tries to recall the last time he heard that piece. “I remember the other duo who played that piece; the cellist arranged that herself.” Daichi made a good choice in picking that particular piece, the pianist thinks, because the sheet music isn’t particularly hard, and will showcase Hinata’s sound if he can co-operate with Kageyama enough to make it through to the end.

As the two look over the music, they can both agree on at least one thing: they’re both skeptical as to how good an cello-oboe duet can really be.

“You and the other two first years who will be joining the club will be playing next week, so you two better spend your time wisely if you want me to see your true potential,” Daichi says, and the two somehow manage to nod in unison.

 

* * *

 

Early mornings find two musicians in the practice rooms of Karasuno’s instrumental wing as the sun rises and other students have yet to wake up, and the faint sound of birds sounds through the window as their stands are lit with artificial lighting and the sun that shines in. There is more yelling than actual productivity as Kageyama gets angry at Hinata for not knowing how to read half of the notes written on the page (though he’s able to find the pitch if Kageyama can find it in him to play the note on the piano).

By the end of their first morning practice session, Kageyama is able to play through his short solo opening and the first two phrases of the duet before he has to restrain himself from getting up and tossing the oboe out the window. Hinata manages to keep his enthusiasm all the way through their hour-and-a-half long rehearsal.

During lunch break, bright orange hair and a bundle of energy find their way down the third-year hallways until he finds the room with the pianist with the soft grey hair. He manages to get Suga to practice with him during lunches for the weak and skip out on eating with Daichi; he can’t find a good excuse as to why he’ll be missing them, especially with it being the start of the year, but he figures if Daichi didn’t want him to help the two first years, then he would stop him.

Hinata is grateful to Suga, helping him learn how to read music and setting tempos for him. The oboist was astounded to learn that the tempo that he and Kageyama had been practicing at that morning was nearly double the intended tempo for the piece, and he rubs it right into the other boy’s face as he sets the bow on the string for their practice the next morning. During scheduled rehearsals, the upperclassman don’t see the cello-oboe duo or the other two first years, though Daichi tells them later that they already picked their piece and that they lock themselves in the practice rooms when the other members of the chamber group are there. There are always two doors closed when rehearsals start.

Kageyama’s homicidal urges decrease over the course of the week, mostly because Hinata is picking up the notes with Suga during lunch practices. The cellist can tell he doesn’t know anything about style in relationship with different composers, though, and he has to stop him more than once to correct note length or phrasing.

Suga has been stressing over making sure Hinata is improving, and so during the practice time he gets with the others, he usually isn’t focusing on his own music. Daichi and Tanaka can tell when they practice with him on their own piece that he’s still worrying, and the clarinetist nearly hits him over the head when he zones out and misses an entrance because of it.

“Stop zoning out. An accompanist is no good if he isn’t accompanying, is he?” And Suga nods and apologizes before jumping right back into the music.

Tanaka ends up joining the first years’ rehearsal on the fourth morning before the official start of the school day, not that it’s really a well-kept secret that the two rehearse before anybody else gets there. They’re rightfully surprised to see him open the door to their practice room, but the atmosphere around the flutist as he steps in to join them changes the mood changes.

Notes played from tired repetition become more open, more alive. When Tanaka pulls out his flute and plays along with Hinata’s part, theres a call and response between Kageyama’s part and theirs that is unlike something the oboist has ever experienced before. Music that was before simply notes rendered from the page now become part of a musical conversation between low string and woodwind that’s significantly different.

“You shouldn’t underestimate your underclassmen,” Tanaka says, all pride and radiant energy. “We have the experience.”

When Hinata goes wide eyed and thanks him with the most enthusiastic bow the second year has ever received, then goes on to tell him, “You’re so amazing!” and, “I want to learn more from you, Tanaka-senpai!” even Kageyama can’t help getting caught in his excitement.

Tanaka thinks he might like this couple of oddballs.

 

* * *

 

“You know, I don’t think Mozart did that,” Daichi says casually as he walks into the central music room where Suga is sitting behind the grand piano, stand light shining brightly upon the keys and the music that’s in complete disarray beneath it; when he looks up at Daichi, the little lamp frames his face in yellow-white light and, even under the dim ceiling lights, makes his surprise that much more evident. The metronome on top of the piano is still ticking, and the sheet of paper in the musician’s hand is completely covered in marks, some blue and some red, both emphasized by bold black. There’s a marker cap in his mouth.

Suga takes the piece of plastic from between his teeth and places it back on the blue marker that it came from so that he can greet Daichi with a warm smile as he walks up to sit beside him on the piano bench, picking up some of the scattered pieces of music and putting them back in order. “It’s already dark, you know,” he says, and it’s as soft and as distant as the night’s cool air outside.

Suga hums in pensive confirmation and glances down at the piece of music still in his hand as he pushes a hand through his hair and out of his face. “Why did you stick around, then?”

“I was going to wait to walk home with you, but you’ve been playing for so long now I figured I’d come in. I was just listening. Takeda-sensei said we could stay as long as I lock up.” The metronome leaves heavy clicks when silence hangs over them, as Suga puts the music back on the piano, as Daichi pulls down the cover for the piano keys and turns of the stand light; it keeps ticking until tired eyes follow the clarinetist’s hand up to the offending object and flicks it off.

“The competition is in 12 days,” Suga says, and it sounds like a plea.

A plea to continue, a plea to improve, a plea that makes Daichi’s lips turn down and his eyebrows knit together, one that carries the resonance of notes that have long stopped ringing.

 

* * *

 

“One more time,” Hinata says, eyes scanning the lines and dots on his stand, practically bouncing on the balls of his feet as his fingers press keys spontaneously.

“Maybe if we didn’t have to keep stopping for you to remember a damn fingering, I wouldn’t be so tired of this piece,” Kageyama growls out. It’s Friday afternoon, the last time they’ll have to practice before they play for the group at Monday’s rehearsal. Though he knows he has to get this right and play it well in front of the upperclassmen, he’s sick of repeating the same sections over and over countless times. He feels like a record that keeps skipping back over the same ten seconds on an endless loop, and he thinks Hinata has gotten a lot more tolerable with the way he’s playing and actually reading the music. It’s just the oboist’s nature to be persistent, and he wonders how the small embodiment of energy has the endurance to keep going without a single complaint.

“I’ve been doing really well, though! We haven’t had to stop at all this rehearsal.”

The clicking of the door opening makes them both turn their heads to see two boys with instrument cases hanging at their sides. Kageyama sees his reflection in the glare from the taller musician’s glasses.

“It’s about time we caught a glimpse of you two,” the blond one says, and Hinata is standing there with a look of confusion until something seems to come together in his head.

“Are you the other first years?” He asks excitedly, and the boy scoffs.

“Yeah, we are,” the other says, freckles and dark hair moving gracelessly up and down as he nods.

“I’m Tsukishima, and that’s Yamaguchi,” he says and motions with his thumb for emphasis. “We’re string musicians too; try not to be too jealous.”

“Tsukki has the best vibrato,” Yamaguchi says, earning him an elbow from Tsukishima. “Sorry.”

Hinata hasn’t met many string players, but the rumor he’s heard about them all being pretentions hasn’t necessarily been disproved yet, and he doesn’t like the first impression he’s getting from them.

“So, an oboist and a cellist, huh? What a pitiful combination. What’s it like playing with the Grand Maestro, huh?”

Something ignites in Kageyama at the mention of his previous title, the one that he carried from junior high and sends him practically staggering up from his seat to confront the blond who had mentioned it.

“Don’t call me that, got it? Why don’t you get lost,” he asserts with a shove. The glare he receives isn’t sharp like daggers, but rather framed with arrogance; he’s teasing, but he’s doing it well and getting exactly the reaction he wants.

“So it’s true. He does get pissy when people call him ‘maestro.’”

“Why don’t you shut your mouth?”

“I’m here, too,” Hinata says timidly, but goes completely unnoticed.

“Why don’t you tell him how you got that title, huh? I bet he’d love to hear.”

“Get lost,” Kageyama says, louder this time.

“You wish.”

“I’m here, too!” Hinata all but shouts this time. “You’re interrupting, so why don’t you stop calling him that and leave so that we can prepare to outstage you on Monday, alright?” Kageyama feels like he should commend him, until Tsukishima shoots the smaller boy another one of those glares and he nearly melts into a puddle of anxiety on the floor.

He huffs out a laugh before turning and gesturing for Yamaguchi to follow him out. “If you want to prove something to the others, maybe we’ll dumb down our performance for you,” is the last thing he says before the door is pulled forcefully shut.

“One more time,” and Kageyama nods.

 

* * *

 

“We’ll be playing Amazing Grace,” Tsukishima says, and Tanaka has the gall to snort before Daichi smacks him.

Nobody expects them to sound as experienced as they seem to be, a first year violinist and a first year violist who are almost always together and play like honey and morning dew on overgrown grass. They don’t expect for Tsukishima to play the entirety of the first phrase as a solo, or for him to do it with such confidence and stability that he looks almost uninterested in the music when everybody else is. A harmony line from viola enters, a base for the violin as the notes keep coming and they seem to draw their composure from each other.

The viola’s sound isn’t as developed as the violin’s, but with Tsukishima playing with an elegant sound and Yamaguchi playing steady and supportive harmony for the contrasting melody, it’s warm and gentle and resembles that of a pink sunrise. The subtle grace notes and undertones make the music seem alive, adds life to the simple annotation of wide notes and repetition. It doesn’t seem dissonant or exaggerated at any point throughout the music, and they seem to trust each other with every phrase, every note that they play. They bring out the best in each other, these two, and there’s no doubt in anybody’s mind that that’s what makes them so inseparable.

They bow at the conclusion to their piece; it wasn’t long, wasn’t anything difficult, but the upperclassman, and admittedly the other first years, will agree that it was the best arrangement of Amazing Grace that they ever heard. Hinata is still clapping when Kageyama nudges him to stand in because he evidently forgot that he will also be performing, even with his oboe sitting in his lap and a reed between his lips (which he nearly drops when he stands up).

“Good luck,” Tsukishima says as they pass each other, and Kageyama can hear all of the malice laced in his speech. “Not that you’ll need it, of course.”

It’s as Kageyama is pulling up his chair and retrieving a stand for Hinata that he notices fidgety fingers and bouncing, and he only then considers the fact that he may have never played in front of an audience before, besides the spur-of-the-moment thing he pulled earlier with the Moldau, and his chances of having played with somebody for an audience is about one to a million. Unluckily for Hinata, Kageyama has never been good with motivational speeches.

“Hey, stop being so shaky, it’ll just mess you up more than you already might.”

The air seems frozen for a moment, which is mostly due to Hinata actually freezing and then completely denying the fact that anything is wrong. “I’m not shaky, and that was mean.”

“Hinata,” a voice comes from the seats in front of them as he almost drops his music. It’s Suga, giving him a smile that seems to be telling him, everything is going to be alright. “Remember what we’ve been working on, okay?”

The oboist’s entire expression changes into that of sunshine and enthusiasm, like it was on that first day in the music room, when he emanated like the bright oranges of fall, because that’s how Hinata is, like the cherry blossoms that bloom in the spring and the leaves that fall off months later, his fervor is beautiful but fragile; just a shift and it’s gone.

When he looks to Kageyama then, it’s with an eagerness that makes the cellist want to start before it disappears, like the pink petals of seasonal flowers in the spring, and colored leaves that will soon be buried in the first snow of winter, and so he starts before the wind can pluck those petals from their stems.

Kageyama’s cello sounds like remorse and longing when he starts, emotions that are not only audible, but visual as well. The movement of dark hair across closed eyes and the way he conveys his emotions through the motion of his arm exerts something upon the audience that transcends the music itself, and the feeling he pours into the phrase flows through the room like smoke, coating everything in its discernable color, covering Hinata in its relentless push and pull, dragging him along when he, too, begins to play.

Cello and oboe, a combination so unknown that it receives a reaction from the audience for simply being, for existing and resounding throughout the music hall with such exuberance that it sounds piercing, a sharp contrast that isn’t as inconceivable as its made out to be; it’s a sound that leaves you wanting more with nowhere to go.

With the drive from the aura that Kageyama had influenced, precision and drive are both at their peaks, higher than they’ve ever been when they rehearsed in practice rooms bathed in sunrise and inevitable starlight. Hinata’s oboe echoes steady reds accented by harsh greens, and Kageyama is working less to match intonation. In other words, it’s the best they’ve ever played together.

The ending chord strikes their audience with a desire for more, more of the unique timbre of a duet that was never meant to exist, not by traditional standards. With the induction of four first years, two who are like pillars for each other and two who play as if they’re competing, the group feels more united.

More united, perhaps, but Suga can’t help but continue to feel a little empty.


	2. Stage Lights Don't Blind Me Like You Do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The room at the end of the hallway is enormous, an auditorium with over a thousand seats, about twice as large as Karasuno’s own and lined with those large jutty ceiling tiles and wall blocks that all auditoriums seem to have. When they look up, there’s a balcony above their heads and lights illuminating the entire cast of seats leading down to the stage. The curtain is drawn in the front, but the stage lights that are lit along the front make the dark blue seem to glow a soft white along the velvety material and sends the seats along the front rows into the same state of radiance. There are a lot of students in white and aqua milling around throughout the expanse of space, filling seats and leaning against the walls, and the sounds echo about each other, making it seem that much fuller.

“Hey Daichi-san,” Ennoshita starts after they finish their phrase and Daichi leans over to drink from the water bottle by his feet.

“Yeah? What is it?”

“I heard there’s a school doing a music festival this weekend,” he says, and Daichi looks at him curiously. “I think it’s at Aoba Johsai.”

“That might be good experience for the first years, especially Hinata. The boy is such an oddball. Him and Kageyama both are.” He’s not wrong, two weeks ago the oboist could barely read music. Daichi is honestly surprised that Kageyama didn’t end up breaking the practice room window.

“From what I saw, it’s workshops and stuff for the morning and then an afternoon performance section for anybody that wants to.”

“Sorry I’m late!” The door closes quickly behind Suga as he bounds in with an armful of papers and a thick black folder that has seen better days.

“No problem. I was gonna ask if you got what you needed, but it looks like that’s a yes,” Daichi teases as Suga practically drops all of the papers on the floor and starts organizing them, separating them into perfect piles right there on the floor.

Not even a moment later, the door re-opens, and Tanaka bounds inside, nearly tripping over Suga when he sees the mess of papers on the floor (he managed to see the piles before he saw the boy hunched over them). “Sorry I’m late,” he yells as he catches his balance and steps on the folder in the process; the pianist whacks him in the calf and pulls it out from under his foot.

“And why are you late, Tanaka?” Suga asks in a singsong voice from his kneeling position on the floor.

“What were you two practicing?” he substitutes instead as an obvious diversion, and Daichi just laughs at him.

“The Sonatina,” he answers simply and shakes his head. “Why don’t you two go practice your piece, I think Ennoshita and I have a pretty nice handle on things here.”

“Give me a minute!” Piles are quickly stacked on top of each other, and when Suga stands he hands the large pile to Daichi, along with the folder that he assumes contains similar papers. “The music,” he grins as he pushes the things into the clarinetist’s hands and strides off to one of the practice rooms, followed not long after by a slightly confused flutist.

* * *

“Hey Suga, Ennoshita told me earlier that Seijou is having a music festival. There’ll be workshops and stuff, do you think I should talk to Takeda-sensei about it?”

Everyone - minus one Ennoshita, who had to leave practice early for a doctor’s appointment - is milling about in the main music room after their rehearsals. Most are packing up their instruments and music, but Tanaka and Daichi still have theirs out. The first years are all partaking in their own conversation on the other side of the room, Kinoshita and Narita are trying to ignore their underclassman, and the other three are huddled around the piano.

“We should definitely go,” Tanaka starts, and Suga already thinks he doesn’t like where he’s taking this. “It would be an honor to grace them with our presence.”

He shouldn’t be surprised when the two third years both end up hitting him.

“Do you think Takeda-sensei would be able to get us a bus?” Suga asks, leaning forward on the piano.

“I dunno, we should be able to. It’ll be this Saturday which is sort of short notice- I know, don’t give me that look, but he’s the most persistent person I’ve ever met.”

“And you would know?”

“Oh, shut it,” Daichi says with a smile, and Suga’s smirk shifts into a snicker, too.

“We should definitely try to go,” Suga says after a moment of light laughter and fondness.

Across the room, Tanaka thinks he hears the beginning of a not-so-friendly conversation between Tsukishima and Kageyama, and since he still has his instrument out and growing cold in his hand, he thinks something up on the fly. What better way to shut them up than by doing it senpai-style?

“Suga, you still play jazz piano, right?”

The third year looks put-off by his question but nods anyway. “Yeah, why?”

“Play something in C,” he says simply and blows some warm air through his flute to make it a little warmer, a little more accepting of the notes he wants to play. After a moment of thinking back on jazz scales and chord progressions, Suga sets his hands above the keys of the piano in front of him and plays.

His easy jazz chords aren’t anything to get excited about, but it certainly turns the heads of the other students still standing around the room, keeps Kageyama’s hand from connecting with the side of Tsukishima’s face, and makes Hinata come over curiously to see what he’s playing. He’s no Keiko Matsui, but he doesn’t need to be; his playing is solid and built from experience, built from practice and observation and devotion. Jazz may have started as a hobby for him, something else for him to learn, but it’s turned into something of a passion for him, though he still prefers to play classical. Jazz is more free, it’s more open and limitless, and whenever he feels like he’s being drowned out by his practices or his peers, it’s what he plays. Some people need an anchor, but others need wings.

It’s after eight measures that Tanaka comes in, and if the first years didn’t know it was possible to beatbox on a flute, they definitely do now. He creates harsh drum beats in perfect contrast to the notes puffed out in between. He produces perfect trills and throaty bass tones that leave their audience with their mouths hanging open. Suga smiles to the flutist, and then to Daichi who is still watching them play, nods to him once, and he seems to get the idea. In just a moment the three of them are playing something akin to ragtime with Daichi playing scalular jazz riffs in jumping octaves on his clarinet, Tanaka giving a steady drumbeat with undertones in the sharp tone of his flute, and Suga laying down the bass chords and giving the music a forward drive with his syncopated rhythms. It’s not standard, but everything within it is so genuine.

Maybe it’s the music, or maybe it’s the look of genuine and unadulterated happiness that’s flooding across the upperclassman as they play, but Hinata feels like dancing, so he does. It’s nothing spectacular, not by a long shot; the boy is all short limbs and energy, but he gives off an aura of rainbow candy and summer rain. It makes the three of them laugh, which causes Daichi to squeak out a note, but it’s okay because there’s no pressure to be perfect. Suga can laugh all he wants, and though he may hit a wrong key because of it, if it gets Tanaka and Daichi to lighten up and play with him like in the sunkissed memories of his second year, then he’s willing to sacrifice a chord every once in a while.

Hinata manages to drag Yamaguchi to dance with him, holding hands and swinging their arms back and forth. Tsukishima and Kageyama are giving them strange looks, but even they can’t keep their feet from tapping on the carpet when they think nobody else is looking. Hinata looks like he’s having the time of his life, jumping and giggling and just enjoying himself, lighting up their drafty little music room with warm winds and red enthusiasm.

This is what music is all about, Suga thinks as he watches the expressions on everybody’s faces, feels the expression on his own face, and realizes that this is what he’s a part of, this wonderful mix of mismatched personalities and passion, and he thinks he feels a little less empty.

They manage to all cut off at the same time, though it involves quite a few exaggerated head motions. Daichi and Tanaka both have to stop to catch their breath once they finish, because beatboxing and belting out high notes in double time uses about as much breath support as you’d expect, and then some.

“Whoa!” Hinata bounces up to the three while they’re all still panting, still living in the moment of their music. “That was amazing! You were all,” he makes a sound in an attempt to imitate Tanaka’s flute growls, and then Daichi’s trills, and all of them are smiling so fondly at the boy that he nearly combusts in excitement. “I want to be able to play like that someday!”

“You will,” Daichi says, clarinet half back in its case now, and Tanaka is cracking up at the oboist’s attempts to relay his excitement through vocal sounds that sound vaguely like the parts they just played. “You just need a little more practice, this kind of stuff doesn’t come overnight.”

“I will! I’ll practice!” he practically yells as he grabs his belongings and sprints out of the music room, followed quickly by Kageyama, who’s yelling curses after him to slow down, but Hinata is already too far gone to care that the cellist will probably end him if he ever catches up. The rest of the students file out soon after, save for the three upperclassmen.

“So, what sparked a jazz session, Tanaka?” Suga asks as he’s finishing putting the piano cover back over the large instrument (with Daichi’s help).

“I heard ‘em bickering over there, those damn first years. Wanted to show them what their senpai are made of.” Suga won’t deny that Tanaka is the image of pride.

* * *

On Saturday, the warm morning air flows through cracked windows and blows pink petals onto doorsteps and makes children’s eyes water behind their glasses. It’s a nice morning, one of the warmest they’ve had since spring began, and watching the sunrise of the early morning, painting the sky with pinks and oranges like sherbet seafoam, is what Hinata likes best about stopping at the top of the hill on his way to school. There’s barely any sound except the distant hum of cars, a few nesting birds and the sound of his own heavy breathing, and it makes getting up so early worth something.

The trees of the city not far off are still glistening in the shades of the cherry blossoms soon to fall on house roofs and sidewalks, and the sunlight beginning to cast everything in a yellow glow makes the town look inviting. It reminds him of hot chocolate in the middle of autumn.

Hinata was so anxious for the trip to Aoba Johsai that he almost didn’t sleep last night; it was his sister who finally got tired of his night-time mumbling and told him to “just close your eyes and sleep already!” The oboist almost expected the anxiety himself. When the trip was officially announced, he couldn’t control his eagerness. Lessons with Suga during lunch breaks remained a constant in his life, practice sessions with Kageyama during rehearsals were extended once more, and the two third years had to tell him more than once to calm down just a little bit.

He lets his bike coast down the hill once he pushes himself off from the top and pedals the rest of the way to school, and the subtle heat of the morning makes it that much better. It isn’t until he actually arrives in front of the school that he realizes that he’d sprinted out the door long before he would have needed to because he couldn’t wait a second longer, and that he’ll be the only one there for about an hour.

Maybe Hinata is okay with that, though, because it’s a smooth-jazz kind of morning, one that makes his anxiety fade for a moment and leaves him giddy, fingers tapping on the pavement as he sits on the curb. It’s a Sloeberry Jam kind of morning, and he manages to get lost in it for 40 minutes before he hears approaching footsteps that are out of sync with the tempo he’d been marking all that time.

“Good morning,” Suga greets as he and Daichi walk up, hands in the pockets of his jacket and that smile shining brighter than the sun at noon. Daichi waves and Hinata jumps up from where he’d been sitting for quite a while, dusting off his pants and picking up his oboe case. “When did you get here?”

“Not that long ago,” he lies. Hinata’s energy is the opposite of the gentle sunrise he had watched only an hour ago, and it will only continue to grow in contrast as more people arrive and his nerves begin to alight once more, forgetting about easy winds and warmth in favor of rapids and firelight.

Everybody else shows up within 10 minutes, including their faculty advisor who claims to admire music, even though he knows nearly nothing about it. Hinata sees somebody else once he gets on the bus that he hasn’t seen before, a stunning girl with black hair sitting four seats up (he only spots her because he follows Tanaka’s line of vision).

“Who’s that?” he asks quietly to the flutist next to him who hasn’t blinked for probably over a minute now.

“That’s Shimizu Kiyoko-san. She’s the club manager. Maybe you’d know her if you and cellist extraordinaire over there weren’t always caged up inside that dumpy practice room of yours.” If both Hinata and Kageyama get defensive, nobody is surprised.

The bus ride isn’t long once they actually get moving and Tanaka manages to keep Hinata from exciting himself into a state of nausea, and maybe being a group of musicians helps to speed the trip along a little faster. It’s Tanaka who starts the humming in the back of the bus, Beethoven’s 5th because he knows that everybody has heard it before, and it spreads like an infectious disease to the other students. They break up into individual parts, their humming morphs to loud and out-of-tune dramatic singing, and soon they’re tapping on the backs of seats for a drumbeat and making shitty remixes of classical music. Everybody is so into it that most of them don’t realize that the bus has stopped.

It isn’t until Hinata realizes that Kageyama has gone silent that he quiets as well. The bus had made something in Kageyama open up, something that Hinata latched onto like he needed it, like it was the base of his energy, and for the rhythmic bass of the cellist’s voice to suddenly stop, the other is alerted in some obscure way that leaves the entire group without a melody line, and within moments the bus is almost completely silent.

“What are you looking at- Oh is this Aoba Johsai?” In an instant the first year is scrambling over Kageyama to look out the bus window, amber eyes reflecting back at him in its glassy surface.

“Yeah, this is Seijou.”

“Is that who you were looking at?”

From the bus, they can see two people walking into the school, wearing matching uniforms and who are presumably students there. Hinata’s breath on the window fogs it temporarily, so he lifts his arm to wipe the condensation with his sleeve. By the time he can see out again, the two are out of sight.

“Yeah, that’s who I was looking at. Now get off of me, you pain in the ass,” he mutters as he shoves Hinata out of his seat and gets up himself, following the upperclassman who had gotten up while he was dealing with a certain orange-haired classmate, grabbing his cello from the front of the bus where it was carefully placed so as to not crash around while the bus moved. Once Hinata scrambles to grab his oboe case, he too is racing after them all, nearly tripping on the last step but catching his balance as he lands on the asphalt.

As a group, the Karasuno musicians head into the school, lead by their club president. The hallways of the school are lined with pictures of past students wearing concert clothes and uniforms, donning pins and medals that shine brightly in the light of the camera flash used to take them. There are so many of them, all perfectly leveled with the floor and tracing the path to the various instrument labs and classrooms that they pass.

“Who’s that?” they hear as they walk by students standing about in the hallway, holding trumpets and violas and drum mallets in their hands and looking on them like they’re outsiders; not that they aren’t, Aoba Johsai is an elite arts school, and to them Karasuno probably seems like ants under their feet.

“That’s the other school that’s coming?”

“I guess so.”

“They’re so small,” is the last voice heard before Tanaka shoots them an intimidating look; at least it’s the last one the team hears before one of Seijou’s students spots a certain cellist.

“Hey, look Kindaichi, it’s the Grand Maestro. Looks like he found a new group to lead.”

“Guess we’ll see if he still lives up to it.”

Kegeyama side-eyes the two students, the same two students who he saw walk in when the bus arrived, and he scoffs before looking ahead and ignoring the two completely.

The room at the end of the hallway is enormous, an auditorium with over a thousand seats, about twice as large as Karasuno’s own and lined with those large jutty ceiling tiles and wall blocks that all auditoriums seem to have. When they look up, there’s a balcony above their heads and lights illuminating the entire cast of seats leading down to the stage. The curtain is drawn in the front, but the stage lights that are lit along the front make the dark blue seem to glow a soft white along the velvety material and sends the seats along the front rows into the same state of radiance. There are a lot of students in white and aqua milling around throughout the expanse of space, filling seats and leaning against the walls, and the sounds echo about each other, making it seem that much fuller.

Hinata has never been in a venue this large before, and Kageyama has to pull on his sleeve to get him to follow the rest of them down to where they’re taking seats until the official event starts. There are other schools in attendance as well, but the ones who consistently catch Kageyama’s eye are the students from Seijou, who also seem to be sitting near the front where Daichi leads them.

“Those guys are scary,” Hinata says, clutching the handle of his oboe case tightly in his hand and making the hinge squeak slightly when he moves it. Kageyama takes the end of the row closest to the wall so that he can lean his cello up against it, then takes the seat next to Hinata. “Why do they keep looking at us?”

“Oh, don’t you know?” comes a voice from Hinata’s other side, where Tsukishima has situated himself. There’s a smugness to it that makes Kageyama scowl.

“Don’t I know what?” comes Hinata’s reply, as curious as always.

“Why they call him the Grand Maestro.”

“Shut up,” he says over the crowd and over Hinata, who seems a little lost and very intimidated by the two significantly larger boys talking across him.

“Why should I, Maestro?”

“Tsukki, stop.”

“Hinata, hasn’t he told you?”

He shakes his head and looks to Tsukishima on this left. “I thought it was just because he’s so good, isn’t that right?”

“Maybe some people think that,” the violinist starts, “but for the other musicians who went to Kitagawa Daiichi, he was the ‘Tyrannical conductor.’ ‘Oppressive composer.’ ‘The egocentric maestro.’ I didn’t believe it until I saw him play for the chamber music competition last year.

“There were countless top-notch schools there from all over the Miyagi Prefecture, amazing players who played any instrument you can imagine. Kageyama’s school went, they had a handful of people performing, including Kageyama and his ensemble doing Mozart’s Quintet for Violin, Two Violas, Cello, and French Horn. The Allegro movement. They were particularly out of sync, if I can remember correctly. It started out mediocre enough, there were tempo problems which caused missed notes and the like. Standard, really, except that the person who kept changing the tempo was the Maestro over there.

“They would have been fine - it wasn’t actually that bad - but the group couldn’t take it any more. Halfway through the piece there’s a break, and the French horn is the one who brings the group back, but he never played the pick-up notes. The piece couldn’t continue because the French horn player refused to play, so they left the stage without finishing the piece.”

Kageyama is silent throughout the recount while the rest of the auditorium’s chatter continues to be just white noise while the memory replays itself in his head with overwhelming blacks.

“You’re right,” he finally says, the silence between them too much. “The competition was a bust. We made a lot of mistakes, but that was no accident. It’s terrifying, having them not respond, to just stop like that.”

“But you play with me just fine.”

Kageyama blinks at Hinata, whose orange hair shifts with his movements and whose eyes are bright and vast under the auditorium lights. The boy with the sparkling  motivation and breathtaking endurance, the boy with so much potential and an energy to match, the boy who played Smetana’s Moldau with stunning technique but still has trouble reading rhythms off of the page, is the boy who stands up for the cellist who was once known as a tyrant and a dictator.

“As long as you keep playing with me, I won’t stop.”

There’s a tap on a microphone that resonates with the crowd and makes everybody go silent and replace their conversations with sounds of folding seats and shuffling. The curtains on the stage are still closed, but now there stands a man, lit in the shining stage lights like the curtains behind him.

“Welcome to the music festival, it looks like we have a good turnout already.” The man’s voice is gruff and unwelcoming, despite the message he’s trying to convey. “It’s an honor to be hosting this year, and to start things off the orchestra’s concertmaster will be saying a few things on the program.”

Onto the stage walks a third year in the same white and aqua of the uniforms of the students they’d passed on the way in, a boy with brown hair and a smile that has some of the female participants in the audience fawning over him.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Kageyama says under his breath as he takes the microphone.

“My name is Oikawa Tooru, I’m the orchestra’s concertmaster, and this festival is going to be a blast.” If he somehow finds Kageyama sitting in the sixth row next to the right wall and winks at him, it’s not a coincidence.  

* * *

Kageyama ends up with Yamaguchi and Tsukishima for string workshops and history lessons, both of which he’s unable to properly appreciate because he’s stuck with three of the most infuriating people he’s ever had the misfortune of knowing, at least when they’re all together. If he’s being honest, he likes Yamaguchi when he’s not worshipping Tsukishima, but the fact that they’re inseparable makes him want to hit something with a rock and play so hard the hair of his bow starts unraveling, but of course he won’t actually do it because that means needing to fix another problem and he won’t give them the satisfaction.

Oikawa is as incredibly obnoxious as he normally is, but his stand partner Iwaizumi keeps him in line as much as he possibly can, which honestly is probably right above “kicking him out the window” level. Kageyama is blaming them all if he can’t remember the name of the first published Bach piece next week, or in the next hour.

Thankfully he gets to reunite with the rest of the Karasuno group for lunch, and his normal bickering with Hinata is refreshing in a way that feels like the sun on a freezing day in winter when a chilled wind stops blowing. He stops shivering for a moment and lets himself take in the warmth, even though there’s still snow on the ground. Hinata talks about the bassoon player from Fukurodani who made fun of him when the wind room director handed out an experimental piece of music, and how that bassoonist had laughed at him when he couldn’t get most of the notes during sightreading, and how Daichi had to physically stop Tanaka from beating the shit out of the guy while Ennoshita calmly explained that their oboist was taught unconventionally and that he has trouble reading music.

“He said I was the weirdest oboe player he’d ever met. ‘You’re the first oboist I’ve seen who is bad at sightreading. Don’t you spend a lot of time on your reeds?’” Hinata’s using his best imitation of the bassoonist that he can, making mouth movements with his chopsticks and rolling his eyes. “Who does he think he is?”

“Alright, alright. It doesn’t matter what he says, you’re still improving, and you can take my word for that.”

“Thank you Suga-san!” He manages a nod before shoving a clump of rice into his mouth, which makes the third year laugh. “Oh! Did any of you sign up for the concert?” he asks, though it comes out muffled and only half understandable.

The group goes silent, and though some members look to others as if asking, did you want to?, nobody says anything out loud. For some, they were too busy thinking about their workshops to consider playing a piece for the final event; others don’t have anything prepared, and they seem almost nervous about not signing up at all.

“Well, I signed up me and Kageyama, so more of you should do it, too.”

“You did what?!” The cellist looks torn between beating up Hinata for getting them into the performance without asking him, and beating up himself for having to deal with the orange-haired nuisance.

“I signed us up for the Piazzolla. I brought my music, so we’ll be fine.”

“That’s not the point here!”

“But we’ll sound amazing!” There’s a pause, long and induced by stunned speechlessness. “We’ll sound amazing, and everybody will know that Karasuno has talented musicians. Don’t you want that?”

“Well, yeah. But I didn’t expect you to go signing us up like that. You have to at least ask me first,” he punctuates with an irritated huff, and Hinata is taking that as affirmation that yes, the two of them will be playing in the concert after lunch. With a wide smile and an enthusiastic, “Yes!” the two of them are officially entered.

Daichi looks to Suga expectantly, waiting for him to say, “Yeah, I’m gonna sign up too,” but he doesn’t. He waits for Suga to do something, anything other than just sit and pack up his lunch, anything but listen idly while the first years talk about their piece, but he doesn’t. He supposes if he’s going to keep waiting for him, then the two of them will be stuck in the same place, running in circles to the sound of anxiety and self-doubt forever.

The uncertainty about his friend, his own nervousness for the pianist whenever he steps up on stage, not knowing how the crowd will react, all three of these things are what prompt him to stand from his place and ask, softly, “Do you want to take a walk with me?” In all honesty, those are exactly the reasons Suga stands, despite the confused glances from the underclassman, and despite the fact that he knows exactly what Daichi will say before they even get out of earshot of the rest of the club.

“I don’t want to play the Mozart,” he says stubbornly, and Daichi stops to lean against the wall of the school, so Suga stands in front of him, hands clenched at his sides. “I don’t need to practice the Mozart, I know what you’re going to say, but I don’t want to do it.”

“Suga, it’ll be good practice for-”

“I don’t want to play it Daichi, You don’t understand.” His eyes are cast down at the grass below his feet, hands stuffed into his pockets to prevent himself from hurting his knuckles.

“I know you’ve been practicing it a lot lately, but-”

“Listen-”

“You should play it so you have an audience before Tuesday.”

“I don’t want to stand on the stage alone.” Suga is looking up again, standing straighter than before with a determined look.

The clarinetist shakes his head, and the chuckle in his response is enough to unnerve the other. “If you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, no.”

“Come on, we’ve been working hard.”

“But it’s not as important as your piece. You’re competing in three days, in case you forgot.”

“Of course I didn’t forget, I just want to play this. One time, please?”

“Suga…”

“I’m not changing my mind. It’s the Saint-Saens or it’s nothing.”

“I can’t believe I’m letting you talk me into this, too.”

Except Daichi isn’t surprised at all.

* * *

After the hour of lunch break and another hour of free time with practice rooms and a couple open jam sessions, students are shuffled back into the auditorium to prepare for the performances that are to come from the various schools that attended the festival, though some schools decide not to enter at all. Solo pieces are set to perform first, so the clarinetist and the pianist wait backstage in the first set with music tucked under their arms while the performers ahead of them walk on, perform, bow, and walk off past them, but it doesn’t unnerve either of them.

A trumpeter from Seijou is still basking in her applause when Daichi and Suga prepare to step onto the stage, into the spotlight where they won’t be able to hide anything from the audience occupying the immense number of seats that they can’t even see under radiation of yellow and white.

Daichi has always admired the way Suga’s hair shines when he steps in front of the dimmed crowd, walking across wood coated in so many protective layers of clear lacquer that he can see the ceiling by looking down and silver reflecting to gold and pure white, like snowfall and children’s toys that have to be dug out bankets of ice, and like a director calling for “cut” so that the cast can look over lines and blocking, because Suga’s presence feels like hope and hard work. It’s how he manages to teach, to juggle five pieces at once, to perfect each and every one of them when he gets a call for “cut” and gets to look over the pages like each chance he gets will be the last glance he’ll be given, because Suga already knows he’s being outdone as the group pillar and he knows - has known - that the only way to stay at the top is to practice harder than everyone and bridge the gap caused by natural talent.

The Saint-Saens Sonata for Clarinet and Piano is a gentle piece in its first movement, like a car traveling long-distance across quiet highways and along fields that bring flowers and weeds in the summer. When the wind blows the grass bends and follows it, making green ripples like waves across the expanse, and at night it’s reminiscent of sitting on hilltops and watching stars hand-in-hand atop a checkered blanket while waiting for the birds to stop watching and the bugs to stop singing. The sonata feels like the day between sunrise and sunset, at noon in the summer or a chilly night in spring, but not with the same effect as watching the sun come and go over clouds painted in pastels.

“Hey Suga,” Daichi had said in the club room near the end of their second year, “I found a piece we should play. Just one movement, here.” And he’d handed his pianist the music before he could say no, hoping that when he played it at night on a keyboard in a locked bedroom with the lights dimmed down just enough for the notes to stand out, that he too would hear the timidness in the piano part, that he would be able to imagine the gentle clarinet refrain overtop of the chords that make him feel like he’s using all the breath of the universe and the stars contained in it, that he too would be able to picture the night sky and the meadow of grass and flowers moving to the breeze as they stop looking at each other long enough to notice.

“Why did you pick this piece,” Suga had asked during morning practice after he played it for the first time with Daichi, when he could hear the clarinetist’s soft breathing from the piano bench, when he was running fingers over the keys but not pressing, not making more sound, just listening, just feeling them there under his fingers.

It made Daichi so happy to play the song with him the first time, and the second, and the tenth and every other time after that. Everytime he saw the sun and the stars reflected in Suga’s eyes, felt them in his playing, responded with his own soft breeze and a multitude of galaxies. He feels them on the stage at Seijou, can hear the intensity in his playing falling back into rhythm with chirping birds and crickets. Daichi doesn’t need the music, he’s played his own part enough times to have every note and dynamic of the duet memorized and plays without hesitation, but he still has it sitting on the stand in front of him, in front of the piano, where he could be casting Suga in a shadow but manages only to draw the attention closer to him when he glances back, when he is consistently motioning to his right, where Suga sits behind a spread of black and white keys that make sounds like a spectrum of color.

There’s nothing particularly special about their performance, there aren’t any difficult runs or dissonant chords that fight to remain in tune, but even so it manages to fill everybody with the same picture: soft spring roadtrips and chilly spring hilltops under a night sky. When they walk off stage after the applause and gold shifts back into silver happiness, Daich hears Suga say, “I’m not afraid to perform any more,” and he thinks it was right to play the duet with him after all.

Among other performers in the solo section of the concert, there’s a tenor sax player with a breathtaking black saxaphone who takes all the attention off of his accompanist, and a solo bassist from another famed arts school in the Miyagi Prefecture, and while the second half of the performers get prepared to play their trios and duets, those who already went take their seats back in the auditorium.

“That was amazing, I’m so pumped,” Tanaka says as the two third years make it down to where the rest of the Karasuno group is sitting, and they both smile to him in the way they’re known to do, unintentionally in sync.

“I can’t wait to hear Kageyama and Hinata play again,” Ennoshita says over the flutist’s shoulder as he leans over to talk to them, too. “I just hope Hinata will be okay, there are a lot more people here.”

Suga nods and leans back happily, watching the curtains move on the sides of the stage, the next group of musicians walking up in front of them. “They’ll be fine,” he says quietly, and watches the trio take their bows before beginning their piece.

Backstage, Hinata and Kageyama are near the end of the set list for the second part of the concert, though among the performers ahead of them are the bassoonist from before and a violinist who looks completely exasperated by his partner, but at least he’s keeping him from making too much noise. Kageyama thinks there’s supposed to be another duo behind them, too, because he doesn’t think an oddball duo from a small school would be put last in a concert held at such a high-level school, and he can confirm this when he hears an annoying singsong voice behind him.

“Tobio-chan, how was lunch?”

Hinata turns around when he hears the voice he remembers from the beginning of the day: the concertmaster's voice. Kageyama doesn’t turn in the hope that he’ll leave them alone, but he’s known Oikawa for long enough that he shouldn’t have expected him to.

“Aw, are you giving me the cold shoulder? So mean,” he whines, and the violinist next to him smacks him in the back of the head.

“You know Kageyama?” Hinata asks innocently, and Oikawa smiles at him with a combination of deviousness and amusement that he doesn’t quite know how to interpret.

“Me and Tobio-chan went to junior high together. He was like my cute little underling. Too bad he can’t control his ego, I’ve heard such tragic things from Kunimi and Kindaichi about junior high.” Kageyama doesn’t seem to take Oikawa’s teasing the way he intends for him to, just stands there passively and takes it.

“Well you’ll see just how good we are,” Hinata says confidently, and Oikawa laughs at him, a dark laugh born from his own ego that makes the first year wince.

“What a silly oboe player. Do you really expect to wow the audience with such a strange combination?”

And as the bassoonist and the violinist who were in front of them walk off the stage and past the two parties still waiting to perform, Kageyama grabs his cello and Hinata’s arm and begins walking toward the stage. “Yeah, he does,” he growls before the two walk into the bright light before them.

Hinata has always dreamed of playing on a stage like the one at Seijou, with a large audience waiting to hear him perform and the beautiful echo of footsteps resounding through the room, but now that he’s here, he feels like running off. He feels hot, and he doesn’t know if it’s his nerves or the stage lighting, but he almost forgets to bow and drops his music on the floor before it ends up on the music stand. Kageyama looks mad at him, he isn’t even hiding it from the audience, and when the oboist finally looks like he’s ready for a tuning note, he just nods to him.

* * *

“Hinata, did you know that in an orchestra, the oboe is the one that tunes everybody?”

His face lights up and his orange curls seem to bounce on his head, his eyes reminding Suga of amber flames.

“Really? They tune the entire orchestra?”

“Yeah,” he affirms with a smile, “and I think you should do it for Kageyama whenever you perform. It’ll make things feel more…. official. Everybody will think, ‘yeah, they’re definitely top-notch!’” Suga knows tuning is standard practice before a performance, though commonly done with a piano onstage, but he knows doing something like that will give Hinata the confidence he needs to play like he does when he’s alone; it’s something to pull himself away from the crowd and toward his cellist, toward whoever he decides to play with, and Suga tells the other first year to ask for his tuning note before they play, for Hinata’s sake.

“You play an A, and everybody will tune to you. Just make sure it’s an A, okay? That’s what everybody plays.”

With an excited nod, he plays the steadiest A he possibly can.

* * *

Hinata plays a B. Kageyama knows that he plays a B, but seeing as he can’t tune to a B, he plays an A, and the sound of the dissonant notes coming together makes Hinata pull his oboe out of his mouth and stare at Kageyama in complete terror. He just did that in front of hundreds of people, in front of hundreds of other musicians who have been playing since they could walk, and he thinks his sweat might seep through his clothes.

This is okay, he thinks, it can’t get much worse than his, can it? He takes another deep breath and plays again, hitting the right note this time and leaving Kageyama to tune correctly.

Everybody, with the exception of the Karasuno students, is holding back laughter for the two on stage. A bad first impression is a terrible thing, and having a bad reputation is even worse. “Wow, Tobio-chan, you’re really stooping that low?” Oikawa whispers from the sidelines, and Kindaichi and Kunimi roll their eyes from the audience.

The beginning starts just like it did when they played it the first time, with Kageyama’s melancholy cello influencing the mood of not only the music, but the spectators witnessing his smooth bow strokes and incredible concentration. Many remember his playing from years past, remember his solo work and his downfall, but they don’t know Hinata, aren’t prepared for his entrance to be like woven silk and honey, sweet and connected. The faces Kageyama sees in the dark of the auditorium fuel him to play better.

Their energy flows between them like water going with the ebb and flow of their phrases, circulating like blood and connecting them like that, an energy that leaves mouths gaping and makes silence ring louder than the whispers that should come soon after. From what everybody had seen of Hinata, they weren’t expecting his sound to be so pure alongside Kageyama’s, weren’t expecting a cellist and an oboist to make their hearts stop and stun them into silence for beats after their performance ends. Hinata’s face lights up at the end like the lights at their feet, and he looks like he’s positively glowing, even as he takes his final bow and still resembles the pulling of the tide.

As they walk off, Oikawa and Iwaizumi are waiting expectantly, violins in hand, at the side of the stage. “Nice one,” Oikawa says slyly before slipping past him, “Not bad at all.”

Kageyama and Hinata stay on the sidelines for the final performance, since trying to make it back into the auditorium would be pointless and because Kageyama want’s to hear what his previous teammate has been up to for the last two years. The stage is cleared save for two microphones and the piano that has been pushed back so as not to distract from the performers. The two violinists position themselves on the stage, tune to each other, and then Oikawa shoots his partner a look that seems to change something about the both of them, though Kageyama can’t quite put his finger on what. A deep breath with closed eyes and an upward beat of Oikawa’s bow, and the two begin.

The two of them play together like metronomes, Iwaizumi’s steady eighths remaining perfectly even and giving Oikawa the opportunity he needs to bounce off of them. They seem like they’re dancing Mozart’s Duo No. 5 to their own beat. The Allegro Maestoso is meant to be cheerful and majestic, but it comes out more aggressive and desperate, to the point where it isn’t Mozart’s any more, it’s theirs. Even with the correct phrasing and style, it’s something completely different than what Mozart had intended for it to be. Oikawa doesn’t even have his eyes open. Neither of them are music geniuses like Kageyama, but it’s obvious the amount of time and devotion they’ve put into the piece and just skill they really possess.

By the end of the piece, by the end of their duel between two violins, both of them are sweating, even though the movement only runs a little over four minutes. They’re Seijou’s star musicians, the concertmaster and his stand partner, the two untouchable violinists with iron wills and an unshakable bond, and it’s clear to everyone that it’ll take more than just an oddball duo and natural ability to come out on top against them. As they take their bows, the two on the side could swear that they see something more between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok so some notes on the chapter. In case you don't know who Keiko Matsui is, she's a pretty famous and really good jazz pianist who writes her own music and it's really beautiful and I highly suggest you listen to it (Antarctica is my favorite).
> 
> Second, Sloeberry Jam is a piece done by a group called Project TRIO who do really cool flute/bass/cello songs, and their flutist can beatbox on his flute and he's really nice and I felt a need to add the song in here because it really does fit how I imagined the morning to be.


	3. To Hold a Moonbeam in Your Hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Asahi! Did you come to play? Will you play with me?” Noya holds his violin close to himself, hoping for a yes but not knowing if he’s going to receive one. He’s been practicing the Passacaglia for days, anticipating a performance. He’s certain his partner knows the whole piece by heart, one of those songs that he’s played so many times it’s ingrained into his being so much that he fingers it on his arm without realizing.

Monday’s morning practice is spent talking about Saturday and handing out new music, which is mainly for the first years since the upperclassman still have things they’re working on. Suga had found a Miaskovsky piece that he thought would suit Kageyama’s playing style, a duet that they can work on together when they’re both not otherwise occupied. While he’s also picked out violin and viola duets for Tsukishima and Yamaguchi, since they seem set on not being split up, the taller boy waves him off and tells him they’re already working on something. His partner doesn’t seem to mind being spoken for, but Suga still makes a mental note to ask Yamaguchi about him and Tsukishima alone. Hinata seems anxious that he hasn’t been given anything, but Suga pulls that worn black folder from off of a filing cabinet along the side wall where Daichi had left it, and hands it to him.

“It’s Britten, the 6 Metamorphoses After Ovid. It’s a solo piece, but if you want to play it, I’ll always be willing to help you. It really is a nice piece.” The pianist knows he’s treading dangerous waters with a solo piece with no accompaniment. Hinata’s been playing by himself for three years, has trouble reading the music and probably doesn’t want to be left to his own devices again, but Suga honestly thinks that the 6 Metamorphoses would showcase all of Hinata’s strong points, if he can read the music to the best of his ability.

Solo pieces can go two ways with musicians. For instruments like the piano, solos are encouraged because of the ability of the instrument and the expected skill of the player. There are a countless amount of solo piano pieces, including the famous Fur Elise and Moonlight Sonata. For musicians who don’t play piano, however, one of the two ways musicians see solo pieces is as a way to show off, to prove just how independent they are as instrumentalists. With confidence and experience, these pieces leave people intimidated and inspired. For other musicians, however, these can also be a major source of anxiety and can lead to feeling secluded and alone, even during practice sessions. Suga doesn’t know enough about Hinata to know how he’ll react to Britten’s piece, but the lunch sessions he’d had with him so far led him to believe that it’s something he can handle and may be able to pull off exceptionally well.

Hinata reaches out and takes the folder from him, flipping it open and squinting at the notes there. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Suga says quietly with a soft smile to match. “Think it over, okay?” Hinata nods and the group breaks apart for their daily classes.

 

 

* * *

 

 

That afternoon as he heads to club activities after his classes, he hears playing coming from the club room, quick and light but not airy. It’s grounded and secure, solid playing built on a tempo that’s pulling back instead of pushing forward, a perfect contrast to Kageyama’s playing, and it sets Hinata’s feet faster. It’s high like the sound of the violin, but it’s different than Tsukishima’s playing, not as rigid and soulful. He’s the first one to the club room besides the mysterious violin player he finds when he opens the door, and his first impression is awe that he’s shorter than himself.

He stops at the sound of the door clicking shut and turns to the person who’s interrupting his practice, not that he has any right to be annoyed because he’d been playing in the middle of the club room. “Sup,” he says nonchalantly as he pulls the violin off of his shoulder with a grin that’s steady like the hands that had moved across strings with calloused fingers and pushed red marks like hickies into his neck.

“Are you part of the chamber music club?” Hinata asks with a sparkle in his eye that makes the violinist smile.

“I might be. You play?”

“I do! I’m an oboist.” He isn’t expecting for the other boy to start laughing at him, and watching the little blond clump hanging from a head of otherwise black hair bobbing on his forehead as he fills the room with harsh sound makes his eyes narrow and his nose scrunch up. “What’s so funny about that?”

“The instrument is a joke,” he manages between high-pitched intakes of breath. “What a waste!”

“What do you mean what a waste? I play very well!”

The violinist is still laughing when the two first years open the door and see an angry Hinata about to lunge at the other musician, shouting out matching “Noya!”s as they stepped in, and the laughter stops.

“Suga! Daichi!” The two walk up to the second year excitedly, hitting his shoulder gently in a welcome that seems universal, like they’re welcoming back a family member. “It’s great to see you two again.”

“We could say the same to you. The club isn’t complete without our star violinist,” Daichi says, and luckily for him Tsukishima hasn’t arrived yet.

“Where is everybody? Slacking off as usual, it seems,” Nishinoya says in a playful voice, one that’s genuine and almost relieved, relieved to be back with familiar friends and close to his passion. “At least I’ve been practicing while I was away.”

“Oh really? What have you been playing?”

“Noya-san!” Tanaka runs into the club room and nearly runs the violinist over, stopping just in front of him with the widest grin Hinata’s ever seen plastered onto his face. Following him in are Kageyama, Tsukishima, Yamaguchi, and the remaining second years.

“Ryu!” Nishinoya replies just as enthusiastically, tears forming at the corners of his eyes. Boy, these two are overly dramatic, Hinata thinks, conveniently forgetting all of the times he’s gotten excited himself over meeting other musicians and hearing them play for the first time. “Look what I’ve been learning, Ryu! It’s the Mendelssohn Concerto,” he says and lifts his bow.

Hinata gets to hear that violin sound again, without a door to muffle the sound, and he realizes just how steady it is, secure like the tracks that carry Tokyo’s fastest trains and keeps skyscrapers from collapsing. There isn’t anything particularly special about it, besides the fact that he’s playing with the precision of a metronome keeping the beat. There aren’t any gaps in his playing, rests are perfectly spaced, and his hand is steady as it moves the bow across the strings.

“Is that what you’ve been practicing, Noya?” Suga asks with his hands in the pockets of his black uniform jacket, and Nishinoya nods.

“I’ve nearly got the entire concerto learned, but it isn’t just the piece that I’ve been working on. I’ve already burned out a set of batteries keeping my metronome playing. You can bet I’ll never miss a beat,” he says with a confidence that rivals Tanaka’s, and Suga’s expression drops temporarily before that trademarked smile returns.

“Do you remember that duet we played last year,” Tanaka says then, clearly hoping to reminisce in their past club days. He still has the piece memorized, it’s his favorite that he’s learned, and he can play it in his sleep.

“Yeah, I remember it.” He sets his hands like he’s going to play, but then drops them, along with his violin, back to his side. “Where’s Asahi? I want to play the Passacaglia.”

The two third years look at each other then, and the flutists is wearing a troubled expression as well, one that says all Noya needs to know just from the silence.

“He hasn’t come back, has he?” The upperclassmen shake their heads, and the first years are a little lost. “That coward!”

“Now, now.” Suga puts his hands up in a motion as if to say, calm down, please, and it’s so like him that Tanaka puffs out a laugh. “You know it’s not his fault.”

“That’s exactly why he should come back.” Noya sounds mad, but he looks more upset than anything.

“Who’s Asahi?” Hinata asks quietly to Kageyama beside him, and the cellist only shrugs.

“How should I know?” he replies, with bite in his words.

Nishinoya looks truly disappointed, and when he turns around he seeks out the open violin case on the floor. “I’m not coming back until he does, too.”

Daichi looks like a troubled parent when he runs his hand over his face in exasperation. “Noya, come on, this is ridiculous.”

“I’m being ridiculous? No, it’s Asahi who needs to re-evaluate himself, not me. I’ll stay here and help out or whatever, but there won’t be any performances. You guys have another violinist, righ?” Tsukishima nods from where he’s standing off to the side.

“Yeah, I’m a violinist.”

“I wanna hear you play.” The first year just shrugs, and though Nishinoya had originally looked like he was anticipating the rehearsal, the others can see that his shoulders are slumping. There aren’t any initial announcements besides Noya’s introduction to the first years, and then he splits off with Tsukishima and Yamaguchi to help them where he can. When Suga goes to practice alone, he can’t help but feel guilty himself.

Daichi and Ennoshita can hear Hinata playing the Piazzolla again, but this time he’s doing it alone, Kageyama and Tanaka having gone off to practice scales and technique. The sound that makes it past the locked practice room door sounds more mellow than usual, but the clarinetists hope it’s just the door muffling the notes. Hinata’s playing has never sounded this emotionally distant. He’s the first one to leave the privacy of the practice rooms a half hour before rehearsals are supposed to end, but he doesn’t look visually upset, doesn’t look it either. They think maybe they imagined it.

Hinata asks if he can listen to the clarinetists play the Sonatina while everybody else finishes up with their practices, and his face is alight the entire time, full of wonder and amazement. Daichi and Ennoshit feel the radience of his gaze and smile to themselves as he exclaims how unbelievable it sounds. He has this quality that makes other people feel good, that makes them want to match his energy and never stop beaming.

When the string players (minus Kageyama) leave their room, Tsukishima looks exasperated, and Yamaguchi looks like he’d been trying to wipe the scowl off of the blond’s face, though he’d failed pretty substantially.

“Uh, Nishinoya-senpai,” Hinata starts, and that gets the violinist’s attention right away, he walks up to the oboist with a spring in his step and stops in front of him.

“Yeah? What is it? Something only your senpai would be able to help you with, I’m sure.” That grin is asking to get slapped right off of his face.

“Who is this ‘Asahi’ person you were talking about earlier? Is he a musician, too?”

The violinist nods, sitting on one of the seats to the left of Hinata where they’re set up like you’d see for recitals. “He’s a cellist, like your buddy Kageyama. Except Asahi is a scaredy-cat,” he says with a huff, crossing his arms over his chest. His violin sits safely on the chair next to him, still in his line of vision.

There isn’t much else for him to say, not anything else he wants to say about the third year who is constantly anxious and who hasn’t been around for his own reasons, because Noya knows that if he starts talking he won’t be able to stop.

Kageyama and Tanaka are the next ones to emerge from practice and join the group in the main club room, and he places himself in the seat to the right of Hinata, avoiding Noya’s violin, though it doesn’t take long for said violin to get snatched from the seat and placed back in its case.

“Asahi is a cellist, too,” Hinata says when Kageyama sits beside him, excitedly gripping the armrest that separates them. He finds the oboist’s enthusiasm to be a little overwhelming after a two hour practice.

“Cool,” he says, and the calmness to his voice seems to put Hinata on edge.

“Try to be a little more enthusiastic!”

“I am,” comes the reply in the same tone.

A couple minutes later, after Kageyama and Hinata almost get into a fight over Kageyama’s apparent lack of excitement, Daichi tells everybody that morning practice will be at the same time the next morning, and they say their goodbyes before the dynamic first year duo is racing out the room after each other. There are still piano keys being pressed behind a closed door on the other side of the room, and Daichi finally goes over drag the pianist playing those keys out of the room, whether Suga wants him to or not. He opens the door slowly, softly, and the notes don’t stop. He can tell they’re becoming more aggressive with the fatigue of practice. Hair that would have fallen into his face is pinned back with little clips so they stay in place behind his ears, clips that he’s kept since he was little because he’s never not needed them to keep pesky strands out of his eyes. When his fingers graze a wrong note, he scowls and presses harder, his tempo unrelenting and making Daichi flinch. He steps forward to place a hand on Suga’s shoulder, and it scares him enough that he jumps.

“Daichi!” He turns and hits him in the stomach, but the clarinetist isn’t sure if it’s because he interrupted Suga’s practice or because he scared him half to death. He can tell that the other’s swing wasn’t as strong as he usually does (because Daichi let’s Suga hit him quite often). “That was unnecessary.”

“Everybody already went home. What’s unnecessary is you staying here to practice yourself to death because you have a performance.”

“I’m not over-practicing, I’m… reinforcing.”

“Mozart isn’t supposed to be that harsh, Koushi.”

“Was I really hitting that hard?”

“Yeah. You’re tired and frustrated, and jeez, I haven’t seen you move your hands like that in a while.” Suga is unclenching his hands and then squeezing his fingers back to his palms in a repeated motion to relax them, and his exceptionally short nails don’t go unnoticed, either. “You’re stressed out. You’ll be fine, you’ve been practicing this piece for a long time ago. It won’t do you any good if you’re exhausted.”

Silver hair shifts when he nods, some sliding in front of his nose when he unclips the little pieces of plastic that were keeping them in place, but he promptly tucks those back behind his ears as he closes the key cover on the piano. He rolls his shoulders back and winces as the muscles strain from being in the same position for a long time, tight under the loose shirt he’d changed into so as not to get his uniform sweaty from practice. Even though there aren’t bright lights and hot body heat in the Karasuno practice rooms, there’s something about playing that makes him too hot to sit in his uniform jacket and shirt. T-shirts do a much better job of conforming to his movements. “I’m just worried, is all. I haven’t been to a competition in a while. The competition… it’s frightening, all of those people. I bet a lot of them from junior high won’t even recognize me,” he says with a laugh before getting up from the piano bench and rolling his shoulders back one more time. “I should really get out of this.”

Daichi nods as he walks out of the practice room with Suga trailing behind not long after. “Yeah. Don’t strain your back too much. You have a competition.”

As Suga picks up his bag from the corner of the main room and turns out the light to follow Daichi out the door and out of the school, into cool night air that still blows warm with blossoms and springtime, he feels ready. It’s a good thing, too, because he’s nearly out of time.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It’s during lunch on Tuesday that Suga stays after class to track down a certain cellist who can be found in class 3, unlike the other two third years who are one class over. Since Hinata hasn’t decided on his next piece yet, he’s stopped asking him for lunch lessons and goes to practice on his own instead, but Daichi seems upset that he isn’t going to stick around for one of the first lunches they’d both been free for since the beginning of the school year, and Suga has to remind him that talking with Asahi won’t take the entire lunch period. Daichi sighs and dismisses him with a wave of the hand.

Though the classroom is right next door, the walk seems longer with the anticipation of their conversation. He’s thought through what he wants to say to Asahi, planned it out and gone over it in his head multiple times in an attempt to prevent him from stumbling over his words like he’s prone to do, but it still makes him a little fidgety; that is until he sees Asahi sitting alone at his desk taking out his lunch, untying it with a gentleness that makes Suga remember that he has nothing to be anxious about, and so he strides over and stands in front of the desk until the tight bun on the back of his head is replaced by wide eyes and a worried face.

“Hi Suga,” he starts hesitantly, stopping in his fumbling with little cloth corners. “I haven’t seen you in a while. Um… Why are you here?”

The pianist’s usually radiant smile is falling flat, replaced with a serious expression and a slight raise of his brow as if to enunciate the fact that he’s there for a reason. He leans forward on the desk slightly, placing his palms on the edge. “Why haven’t you come back to club activities?”

When Asahi looks away guiltily, it tells him all he needs to know, and he thinks he really should have expected his answer. “I can’t come back,” he says, and he sounds so fragile, which is a stark contrast to his “wild” appearance. “You know what happened. I’m not the foundation you need me to do, and I’m no cellist. You’re doing fine without me, aren’t you?”

“No,” Suga sighs out, tightening his fingers on the corners of the desk. “We want you back, Asahi. That wasn’t your fault. We need you to come back. We have a bunch of new first years who could learn a lot from you, there’s even a cellist, and he’s really good, but…” He looks to the side to contemplate his next choice of words. “He should really have somebody to look up to. And the others, there’s an oboist who’s so intrigued by other musicians, and two other string players who Noya is helping-”

“Noya?” Asahi interrupts, disbelief shining in those deep eyes. “He’s come back?”

The other boy isn’t sure how to respond to that, so he looks to the floor as if it’ll give him the answer. Noya had said that he wouldn’t be re-joining the club, that he was only going to be there to assist, to help the first years and anybody else who needed him. “Well, not really,” is what he eventually settles for. “He wants you back, to play with him.”

Asahi shakes his head, revisiting the lunch still sitting half-opened in front of him, and Suga steps back from the desk. “I can’t. Not after what happened. I hope you understand, Suga.” He does, because that performance is something that will stick with him for a long time. Being fully exposed in bright lights where the audience stares daggers through you and you’re unable to stare back, the stage is a dangerous place for performers. When the worst happens, it takes time to recover, and the two of them know that better than anybody. The desire for somebody to be there with you, supporting you, is something Suga had needed, too. Some people just need longer than others, he thinks as he steps back and makes to leave.

“Oh, and Asahi,” he says with his hand on the doorframe, and the brunet looks up from his chopsticks to find him standing there. “If you still enjoy playing, that’s enough reason to come back, isn’t it?”

He smiles over his shoulder and steps out into the hallway, walking back to class 4 where Daichi is waiting for his return, and they spend the rest of the period talking about Mozart and memories.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“We’re going to be missing rehearsal today, so Shimizu is going to run rehearsal. You two need to make sure everybody stays on track.”

Tanaka and Ennoshita are looking between each other with confused expressions that only seem to amplify as time passes. “You won’t be here?” Tanaka starts with a raised eyebrow. “And why not? I wanted to go over stuff today.”

“I’ve got a competition, and we’re both going,” Suga says, and Daichi nods.

“So do what I said, alright? We’ll be back tomorrow morning for rehearsal, it isn’t that big a deal.” The two second years nod and mutter ‘yes’s before the others makes to leave quickly and get to the competition venue.

Ennoshita and Tanaka talk between themselves for a couple minutes about their respective pieces with Daichi before Kiyoko comes in, followed by a group of bickering first years, which is enough to make the flutist’s emotions do flips across his features. Since that makes the last of the group members who need to arrive, Tanaka steps up, confident as ever, places his hands on his hips and addresses everyone.

“Now, now, Daichi-san and Suga-san aren’t going to be here today, so it’s up to us upperclassmen to run rehearsal. Kiyoko-san, you have the plans, right?” When she nods, clipboard in hand, he continues. “As wonderful as ever, Kiyoko-san!”

“Where are they?” Hinata asks. “Daichi-san and Suga-san?”

“Suga said he has a competition, but they’ll be back tomorrow morning for practice, so no slacking off, you hear me? Listen to your upperclassman!”

Even as Kiyoko reads off practice schedules, the group seems more off than usual, thinking about the third years and the competition, and about new pieces and having nowhere to play them.

The aforementioned third years arrive at the concert venue ten minutes before the first competitor is scheduled to perform, so Suga rushes to the bathroom to change into his concert clothes. Dropping his bag on the floor of the bathroom in front of the sinks, he looks at himself in the mirror in front of him. It’s smudged with fingerprints and dotted with specks where soap bubbles hit the glass, and the pianist takes a deep breath as he looks over all the imperfections glaring at him in the otherwise clear reflection. Pushing himself away from the counter there, he pulls his bag to the side and changes out of his school uniform and into the suit he’d folded neatly this morning and tucked safely into the bottom of his bag, along with his shoes and a little container filled with silver bobby pins. He changes quickly, fearful of anybody else coming in and seeing him there, and is clasping the buttons of the suit jacket when somebody finally does. He doesn’t pay any mind to the person, though, because he has other things to worry about, like the way his hands are shaking as he tries to push the button through the hole. In this condition, there’s no way he’ll be able to place in the competition.

Daichi, who really should be sitting in the auditorium as the first of the performances start, comes into the bathroom a couple minutes later figuring Suga will need the encouragement, and finds him there alone and leaning over the sink, water dripping from his face from when he’d splashed it in his face just a moment before. “You alright?” he asks as he steps carefully to his side, leaning back against the counter to look at him, not the reflection behind him.

“Fine,” he muses, “I’m fine. What are you doing here?”

Daichi shrugs and looks up at the ceiling instead, tapping his fingers against marble idly. “Thought maybe you’d be here.” The little plastic case of bobby pins is sitting open next to his hand, some spilling out of it and laying on the countertop around it. Daichi picks up one of the pins and spins it around in his hand in front of him. He can see the way his friend is shaking, looking up at himself in the mirror.

“I’m just a little worked up,” Suga supplies, straightening up from the sink and giving Daichi a wavering smile. “This is my first solo competition in three years. It makes sense I’d be nervous.” His voice is level and he looks himself over before reaching for the bobby pins, silver like his hair: a bundle of emotions like closed white blossoms and stones smoothed over by nature’s design that’s most easily described as a silver. Suga’s entire being is silver like river water at dusk and coins glistening in shallow lake beds, altered greenhouse windows and carnival lights at night lit up like stars, but closer, within reach. It’s the reason Daichi got him the silver pins in the first place.

“You have the entire first half to collect yourself, so just… take deep breaths and relax. You’ve practiced this piece half to death. You’ll be fine.” It’s then that Daichi takes the silver pin that he’d been twirling between his fingers and carefully slips it into the other’s hair, pushing loose strands out of his face and behind his ear. Suga’s eyes don’t leave Daichi’s the entire time his hand is in his hair, his brown eyes anxious and almost shy, an endless void of fireflies and chocolate enthusiasm. When the hand drops, they’re both flushed pink, and Suga doesn’t notice his cheeks are beet red until he turns quickly to push the rest of his hair back with silver metal clips. He nods at himself once in the mirror and grabs his bag from the floor after haphazardly shoving everything back into it, and pulling Daichi out of the bathroom after him.

“You need to go back in and watch the performances, I’m gonna go backstage and wait.” He lets go of his friend’s wrist as they stand outside the auditorium doors, large and heavy and closed while somebody plays inside. “I’d come with you but I’m the first person in the second half, so I can’t.”

“I’ll sit where I always do, you can look for me if you need to. Count on it,” he says, and flashes a captain’s smile, one that’s encouraging and inspirational, and as the doors open behind them and Daichi slips into the auditorium, Suga puts a grin on his face as he turns toward the waiting area for the competitors. He thinks he can still feel the soft brush of a steady hand across his cheek.

There aren’t any pianos back where the competitors are told to wait, nothing to practice on while they rial themselves up for their performance, so all Suga can do while waiting for musicians to come and go is to tap on the floor in a pattern that resembles hitting keys and getting only clicking noises in return. There’s a time limit on the pieces, so the first set passes relatively quickly, even more so because Suga is lost to himself, replaying the same piece over and over like a broken record in his head, setting the tempo and keeping it there, starting and stopping and starting and stopping and starting again until the backstage announcer calls, “Next competitor, Sugawara Koushi-kun.”

Rising to his feet, he straightens his suit and brushes off his pants, taking a final deep breath before walking to the side of the stage, where he can see people still up and chatting, but the lights dim and come back up a few times, and he knows he’ll be on the stage before him in just a minute or two. He’d zoned out, kept to his own thoughts for the entirety of the first set and pushed all thoughts about where he is and what exactly he’ll be playing for into the back of his head. They mean nothing now, as his fingers itch for actually keys to press and music to play. He wants to hear himself, hear his notes, and when the lights dim in the auditorium and brighten on stage, he walks into it, welcoming the hot press of the lights like an embrace.

He walks across, takes a bow, sits at the piano bench, moves it a little lower, settles into it; it’s all coming back to him, the mechanical motions of a piano competition. His first one in years, and the theme is Mozart’s piano pieces. Finding a piece that wouldn’t be overdone or too simple for the marks of the judges was difficult for him, but he’d settled on the Piano Sonata #4 in E flat major, movement III: Allegro. Picking a tempo, learning the style of the time period, interpreting Mozart the way he’s supposed to be interpreted, he’d done it all after rehearsal hours, after he’d worked with Hinata and Daichi and Tanaka and anybody else who’d said they wanted somebody to play with, put his own piece after them all and stayed up with markers and an extra bottle of water to practice this piece until he was confident he could play it with his eyes closed, not that he’ll risk that now.

He runs the pads of his fingers over the keys lightly, memorizing how the first couple chords feel under them. He glances into the audience once, hoping to see Daichi sitting on the left side of the theater, five rows from the top where he always sits, where Suga always looks, but he isn’t there. There isn’t anybody there, nobody that could have taken his seat, and he doesn’t know how Daichi would have managed to get himself kicked out of the auditorium, and he wouldn’t have been as careless as to leave at intermission when his best friend is the opener for the second set… He doesn’t want to think about any of these things, so he tells himself that he’s just sitting somewhere else, he still has to be there. The notes will still reach him.

And then he doesn’t have any more time for thinking, because he begins the piece, the Sonata #4 in E flat major, a movement he’s been told he’s played too fast and then too slow, the piece that he told everyone he was going to learn all by himself, played it for his piano teacher a couple times when he first picked it, and then took all the criticism she’d given those first few times and did the rest himself. The piece is quick and bouncy, energetic like nothing he’s used to playing. Quick pieces never were his style, preferring to keep them mellow and emotional, not quick like the jolt of lightning that the Allegro seems to give off.

Once he starts, he realizes he’s started it a bit slower than he usually take it at, but he can’t speed it up now. If he wants the points for consistency and tempo, he needs to keep it where he starts it, and he tries his hardest to do so. It actually takes a little stress off, playing it a little slower, because he’s practiced it at a higher tempo, practiced it at what requires a little more skill to hit all of the notes, and he can worry a little less because of it.

When Suga plays, he imagines a rabbit in winter, a coat of white and bright pink paw pads that jump across patches of snow too high for her, ears peeking over the top as she stalls for a moment before moving on as if she’s being chased. She disappears in the sea of white around her, the only thing picking her out are the black eyes like little gemstones on the front of her face, and then she jumps again.

Suga’s pale fingers, like the rabbit, jump around on the keys until the very end, leaving him with a few stray strands of hair in his face and his gaze set only on the white in front of him, the white with the occasional black that make his furry companion come to life, but it’s over as abruptly as it begins, and when he stands and bows with the applause ringing in his ears, it all happens instinctively.

He spends a while offstage, after he’s changed out of his concert clothes and back into something more casual, and listens to everyone after him. It sends his nerves all over the place to hear the other performers, especially the ones with what he deems amazing technique, but he reminds himself that he didn’t miss a note and executed the style down to the note, so he doesn’t have to worry about placement, not that that really matters to him anyway.

When everybody is done performing, everyone gathers in the lobby while the judges make their final decisions on the winners of the competition, which is where he finally finds Daichi, and surprisingly, Nishinoya. “Noya? What are you doing here?”

Nishinoya laughs like he used to during club practice last year, when he’d miss the key signature and play a half step off and make the chord agonizingly difficult, and it’s something Suga has missed. “You can’t hide things from me. I figured I’d come and cheer you on in the sidelines.”

“Sorry I wasn’t in my usual seat, he saw me and waved me over. I saw you look up there and then felt bad,” Daichi says apologetically, not that Suga could ever stay mad at him; a whack to the arm is all he needs to tell the other that the apology is accepted.

“I figured you were there listening, it’s alright.”

“I, uh,” Nishinoya cuts in, swaying on his feet. “I wanted to tell you that I really do want to come back to the club.” The other conversations in the lobby serve as white noise to keep people from overhearing and staring, and they’re all thankful for it.

“I want to come back, but I can’t. Not unless Asahi is there, too. I can’t go on playing if he thinks that it was all his fault, and you better not believe it was yours, either.” Suga looks sheepish. “I’m sorry. Good luck, you sounded amazing,” Nishinoya finishes before waving and exiting the venue, leaving the two to look to each other bewildered.

What are we going to do about them?

 

 

* * *

 

 

On Wednesday morning, Suga is almost immediately surrounded by fluffy orange hair and jet black and all others in between, all asking how the performance went yesterday.

“Tanaka-senpai told us you were at a competition! How did it go? Your playing is amazing, you got a good place didn’t you?”

“Jeez, calm down, you’ll overwhelm him,” Kageyama scolds Hinata maliciously, and the smaller boy shrinks back. Suga wants to placate, but they don’t miss a beat with the questions.

“How did you place?”

“Was the competition good?”

“Were you nervous?”

“Did you mess up?”

“Was the auditorium big?”

Suga has his hands up in surrender to get them to quiet down so that he can answer their questions. Morning rehearsal hasn’t even started and they’re giving him a run for his money. “Alright, alright, give me a second. I haven’t even put my bag down yet.” They immediately clear a path to let him in and Daichi, who had walked to school with him again, like every morning, can’t help but to laugh at them. They’re all back around him in an instant.

“The auditorium was pretty big, but it wasn’t full. Um, no I didn’t mess up. The performance went very well for me, actually!”

“It was a personal best,” Daichi adds proudly.

“I was definitely nervous at first, but then I had some time to collect myself and I was okay. Everybody played very well, it was really impressive.”

“But how did you place?” Nishinoya asks. He’d left before the rankings were announced, and his tone suggests that he knows why Suga has left that answer for last.

“I placed fourth,” he says quietly, but he says it with a smile so gentle that the group almost isn’t upset for him.

Almost.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Come on, Kageyama!” Hinata is practically running down the hallway toward the third year class 3, Kageyama following behind at a much more acceptable speed of walking so he doesn’t get yelled at by the vice principal, who’s rumored to have a ridiculous temper.

“Slow down, you don’t have to run. You’re unbelievable.”

“I don’t want to be late for rehearsal.”

The classes only let out a moment ago, and a lot of the students are still inside. Club activities start in a couple minutes, so the duo decided they would pop in on the third year classrooms to talk to the cellist they’ve heard so much about. Kageyama is intrigued that the missing member happens to be somebody who plays the same instrument that he does, which is why he agreed to come with Hinata in the first place.

“Asahi-san?” There’s a boy with long brown hair leaving the classroom, which is what Nishinoya had told them to look for had they wanted to see them. The boy turns at the call of his name, and Hinata beams. “Hello Asahi-san! We’re Hinata and Kageyama, and we’re in the chamber music club. We’ve heard a lot about you.”

“You did?” He seems worried by that bit.

“Yeah, about how amazing a cellist you are. Kageyama is a cellist, too.” When he nods, the black hair in front of his face falls out of place. “We were wondering if you’d come back and teach us, please.” And he bows quickly to him. Some of the people in the hallways passing by are staring, but they don’t care.

“You aren’t the first ones to ask me to come back, but my answer is the same. I can’t. I’m sorry, but… risking a mistake is something I can’t handle right now.”

“I felt the same way,” Hinata says seriously, in contrast to the bubbly nature he was giving off just a moment ago. “But then I played with Kageyama, and even though I screwed up our tuning note and made a fool of myself, he helped me pull myself together and we played for this huge group of people,” he puts emphasis on the word ‘huge,’ “and it was the best I’ve ever played.”

There are students in the hall yelling about being late for club activities, and Kageyama taps the other’s arm. “We have to get going or Daichi-san will get mad at us,” he says, and Hinata nods, saying goodbye to Asahi and heading in the direction of the music wing. Before he turns as well, Kageyama adds one last remark.

“I would really like to hear you play, Asahi-san. Please consider coming back. Noya-san talks about you a lot.” Then he gives a bow and heads after Hinata down the hallway.

They don’t see him again until Thursday’s after school club rehearsal, when they’re all congregated in the main room waiting for Suga to relay the practice schedule.

“Noya, I want you to work with Hinata today on scales, since he doesn’t have a piece. Tsukishima and Yamaguchi can practice together again if they want, Daichi and Tanaka, you can work on your duet, you other second years have pieces to be rehearsing, right? Okay, so you can practice those in the main room, and I’d like to work with Kageyama today, if that’s alright with you.”

“Of course.”

“Alright, then- Asahi?”

Suga looks to the doorway, where the other third year is walking in with a cello case behind him, looking anxious surrounded by the other club members, hand tightening around the handle.

“Asahi! Did you come to play? Will you play with me?” Noya holds his violin close to himself, hoping for a yes but not knowing if he’s going to receive one. He’s been practicing the Passacaglia for days, anticipating a performance. He’s certain his partner knows the whole piece by heart, one of those songs that he’s played so many times it’s ingrained into his being so much that he fingers it on his arm without realizing.

He fidgets under all the attention, but Nishinoya’s gaze draws him in. It’s the same gaze that got him to agree to play the Passacaglia in the first place, the one that coaxed him onto an intimidating stage and helped him forget the audience beyond him, made him have confidence in confidence alone, and brought out his full potential as a powerful musician. It’s the same one that makes him agree now, as the others clear the space in the front of the room where they hold little recitals and make announcements. Nishinoya places a chair there for him, takes his place to the cellist’s left, and places his bow on the string.

“I’m ready when you are,” he says, and once Asahi plays a couple notes for tuning purposes, he nods, and the first chord blows everyone away. The Passacaglia is a rigid piece that’s earned the nickname “The Impossible Duet” by some who have attempted to play it, but the two make it look so easy. It has everybody on the edges of their seats with the passing phrases and tempos and rhythms that are constantly changing, but the two of them execute each of them perfectly, without pause. Asahi’s playing is deep and powerful, a loud sound that doesn’t cover the violin, but enhances it. The higher notes have a beautiful contrast against his, and the speed doesn’t waver a bit. Nishinoya keeps it pushing forward, not even giving the cello a chance to possibly slow down, or to suddenly pull out of the piece.

Even the upperclassman who have played with Asahi before don’t recognize the sound, as if it’s more mature, a little less confident but more secure in a way, and as they play the final chord, they’re smiling at each other, and Suga feels more complete now that the last member of Karasuno’s chamber music club has returned to their family. A family of musicians who all encourage each other through music instead of words, through gazes and smiles and pitches that make every performance a new experience, no matter how many times you play the same piece.


	4. We Won't be Getting Any Sleep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yamaguchi’s first thoughts are of winter walks and rosin-rubbed fingers, of elementary school and a lack of motivation. Tsukishima is a constant in his life and has been for many years, through many memories, and for far too long for him to answer the question simply. In all honesty, he would rather not answer it at all. He doesn’t know the right words to use to describe how he feels, how they both mutually push each other forward and stay up until two in the morning on school nights listening to music and staring up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. I guess I don’t really want to talk about it.”

Friday is quiet in the main room, with the exception of a few faint clicks from lock mechanisms as the musicians come and go to get water or ask questions. Nobody is practicing in the main room, everyone prefers to stay in closed practice rooms to rehearse in the company of silence or with their one partner. Concentration is at a record high, and in turn so is the playing ability. The comments made between run-throughs are short and definitive, as if they don’t want to stop the flow that the music provides for even a moment before they dive back in head first and become swallowed by the sounds like waves over grainy beaches and the shells that get lost as the tide pulls back, only to be left there again a few moments later.

Suga and Yamaguchi are among the students practicing together, running scales and arpeggio patterns on request from the violist. They had started with simple scales: C, G, F, D, B flat, A, E, E flat, and kept adding sharps or flats as they went along, doing thirds and fifths and chromatics before moving on to the next. Yamaguchi’s technique is still shaky and indefinite, lacking the confidence he needs in order to stand like the pillars he and Tsukishima had seemed to resemble when they played Amazing Grace and were met with an audience of wide eyes forged from underestimation.

“I know next to nothing about string instruments, but your hand still seems unsteady. Your bowing hand, I mean. It seems like you’re afraid to play the notes.”

Yamaguchi looks down at the bow and at his hand as he holds it, twisting his wrist as if he’s examining it. Despite his hesitant nature, he has a power and inner drive that Suga has come to notice in their private practices. “I am afraid, sometimes. I’m afraid to play the wrong note or miss the string.”

“But if you don’t play out, you’ll never hit the right notes, either.” This catches his attention, causes him to look up at Suga who’s turned on the piano bench and leaning forward with his hands on his knees. “It’s like you’re eliminating the possibility for yourself to play what you really want to play by being afraid of what you don’t. Ahh, that was a really bad way of explaining that.” Suga’s smile is apologetic, even though it has no reason to be.

“I guess what I mean is that if you hide behind your viola and behind your partner, you won’t be able to confidently play the right notes because you’re afraid of what could happen. You’re getting rid of the negative, but you’re also getting rid of the positive. If you play out, then your good notes will sound wonderful, and at least your mistakes will sound intentional. Does that make sense?” Yamaguchi nods, still putting all of the pieces together in his head, but beginning to understand what he was just told.

“I usually don’t play by myself. I don’t have to worry about tone or anything because Tsukki covers me. All I have to do is play the notes, so I never tried to fix my playing. Maybe after a while I felt like there was just one sound, anyway.” He offers the pianist a small shrug and a smile, not like the apologetic one that Suga gave earlier. Yamaguchi’s smile is gentle and trusting and underlying with confidence.

“Tsukki always assured me that I was playing well, and it made me want to improve but it wasn’t like he was pressuring me either way. I didn’t feel like I had to but I wanted to, you know, because he’s…” He looks up like the ceiling might provide some sort of answer for him there. “For lack of a better word, he’s confident. Like in the way he plays, he’s confident enough to tell me it doesn’t matter if I’m not at his level yet because he can make up for it. I want to be like that, too.”

“You see a teacher, right?”

“Yeah, Shimada-sensei and I have been going over bowing and vibrato lately. I’m so used to not needing it that it’s taking me longer than it should be to learn how to do it.”

Suga shakes his head and Yamaguchi watches the silver hair move back and forth on his haid. “There’s no right or wrong amount of time it takes somebody to learn. You just have to…. do it I guess. While we’re stopped here, would you mind if I asked a more personal question?”

The chair in the corner of the room is pulled up across from where Suga is sitting on the piano bench, and Yamaguchi sits down and sets his viola across his lap, the bow clinking as it’s placed on the music stand beside him. “Sure, I don’t really mind.”

“Why do you let Tsukishima talk for you?”

Yamaguchi’s first thoughts are of winter walks and rosin-rubbed fingers, of elementary school and a lack of motivation. Tsukishima is a constant in his life and has been for many years, through many memories, and for far too long for him to answer the question simply. In all honesty, he would rather not answer it at all. He doesn’t know the right words to use to describe how he feels, how they both mutually push each other forward and stay up until two in the morning on school nights listening to music and staring up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. I guess I don’t really want to talk about it.”

Suga nods in understanding, waving his hand in front of him in a dismissive gesture. “It’s fine, it’s fine, I won’t make you tell me anything you don’t want to. I can tell you go pretty far back.”

Yamaguchi looks, for the first time that Suga has seen him, content. “We do,” he says softly, an edge of excitement tinting his voice. “I love playing with Tsukki, like when we did the duet for everybody. We’ve been playing that arrangement for over a year now. And when we practice together it makes me really happy. Tsukki is so cool.” The pianist finds his little giggle endearing.

“Sometimes he lets me pick the music we practice, and when we play it he always tells me that I pick really good music. I picked out Amazing Grace at the start of our last year of junior high because the beginning has a violin solo, and he thought it was really silly at first. That I would pick out a piece just because of something like that.”

“And you’re working on something new?”

“Yeah,” he says, “We are.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

It’s during Hinata and Kageyama’s practice on the same day that Hinata can’t stay focused like everybody else seems to be able to, but it isn’t his nerves or the anticipation that tomorrow is the weekend, it just was never in his nature to devote 100% of his mental concentration to one thing, preferring to assess multiple things all at once. Which is why he can’t stop thinking about the piece Suga had given him last Monday. Kageyama can tell that his partner’s mind is elsewhere by the way he misses the entrance note halfway through the song, a note Hinata hasn’t missed since they were first practicing. They’re playing the only piece they know, the Piazzolla, because Hinata couldn’t bring himself to play with anyone else.

“Hinata, that’s the third note you missed, what’s the matter with you? We’ve practiced this piece half to death, you should have it memorized by now.” Kageyama is clearly frustrated; Hinata’s been tugging on his own mental focus since the second they stepped into the practice room.

“Are you tired of this piece?”

“What do you mean?” The question comes out of nowhere, considering they’ve been going over it for the past twenty minutes and Hinata hasn’t said a single thing before that. “Of course I am.”

“Then why do you keep playing it with me?”

“Because you asked me to. And because you suck.” The oboist glares at him, though he should have expected a straightforward answer. “Do you have anything else you want to play?”

He sets his oboe down on top of his case on the floor and pads over to his bag, where he pulls out an old black folder that is now bent around the corners from being pressed up against the other papers and books he was keeping it with. “Suga-san said that I should play this,” he mutters and hands the folder to Kageyama, who snatches it from his grasp and begins by unbending the corners. “Hey knock that off, it’s not important.”

When he finally opens the folder and sees the Britten inside, he looks up with a confused expression. “The 6 Metamorphoses? But this is a really complicated piece.”

“I know that! Are you saying I can’t do something complicated? Suga-san said it would be a really good piece for me to play,” he huffs, and crosses his arms.

“Why are you showing me, then?”

“Well, because I don’t know if I should do it or not.” Hinata sounds nervous. It’s like voicing a fear, one that isn’t necessarily secret but still stings to admit.

“Well it’s purely solo. Would you be okay doing that?”

“I don’t know.”

“The entire thing is, what, like 13 minutes long?”

“I don’t know.” He says it stronger this time.

“It’d be best if you memorize the whole piece, too, would you be able to do that?”

“I don’t know, Kageyama!” Hinata’s anger is reflected in clenched fists by his side and the downward tilt of his brow, they way he’s hunched over just slightly and looks like he might pounce on the cellist if he says anything else. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to do a solo piece, and I don’t know how long it is, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to memorize the whole thing. That’s why I’m asking you if you think I should do it or not, because I have no clue.”

“Why are you asking me then? I’m not the one who suggested it to you in the first place.” Kageyama seems just as fed up, if not more, than Hinata is.

“Because you’re a genius. You’d know if I would be able to do it or not. You knew how to get me to read the music for the Piazzolla when we first started working on it, and I’ve heard you play with other people, too, and you always seem to know. I don’t know what you know about playing but you always adjust yourself, which means you must be able to tell how other people play. So you would know.” He seems confident in his response, and Kageyama wouldn’t be surprised if he actually sat and thought through it all at one point.

“I think you should play it,” he says simply. “It could help. With a lot of things. You have the tone for it, at the very least.” Hinata would get mad at him if he wasn’t busy reclaiming his music and making the mental note to tell Suga about that later. He’s happy, in a way, that he has an answer for the piece now, even though actually playing it will be more difficult than anything he’s ever played. “Can we get back to playing now?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says as he picks up his oboe and wets the reed to play again, and nods to Kageyama to start the song. He gets back in the zone and everything goes smoothly until Hinata misses the first entrance he has in the entire song, which makes Kageyama stop playing to snap at him.

“Hinata!”

“What was with the whole thing at Seijou?”

“What are you talking about?” The cellist is stunned by the fact that his yell seems to have done nothing to affect the other boy.

“You know, before we started, and I played… it was a B, and you played an A.”

“What about it?”

“Well, you glared at me like you knew it was gonna happen before you even played, but how did you know? That it was wrong?”

Kageyama sighs and puts his bow down across his lap, sensing that this conversation is going to take a while. “I have perfect pitch.”

He was expecting an overly-dramatic reaction, complete with gaping and spouts of Hinata language that don’t make any sense, but instead he was met with a blank expression. “What’s that?”

“Do you not know anything about music?”

“Oi!”

“Perfect pitch is when you know what a note is just by hearing it. After I learned the note names, I was just able to tell what notes where what. I could tell your note was a B, but I can’t tune to B so I played A anyways and hoped you’d realize how ridiculous you were being, which you did.”

“That’s amazing!” There’s the reaction Kageyama was expecting before. “But, why can’t you tune to a B? Does it really matter?”

“Yes it matters! String instruments can only tune to the open strings, and since the open strings are C, G, D, and A, I can’t tune to a B. I just tune the others to the A based on the relative pitches, and of course I can adjust my fingerings slightly if I’m not in tune with somebody - you, for example - and then go on playing like that. That’s the amazing thing about string instruments, you can change the fingerings just slightly and adjust to anyone, and string players are so much more visual with bowings.”

Kageyama never would have guessed that his explanation was something that was funny, especially since he was talking almost angrily about his beloved string instruments, but Hinata bursts into laughter, tries for all it’s worth to hide the snickers and gasps behind his hand. In turn, this makes dark blue eyes glare at him angrily. “What’s so funny?”

“Kageyama, that was probably the most pretentious thing you’ve ever said to me.” His entire hardened expression falls in a second. “Is that the same with every instrument, though? Or does everyone tune to an A because of the string players?”

“To be completely honest, I don’t understand the reason why we tune to an A, all I know is that it has something to do with the relativity of the hertz used for each pitch and that the oboe has such a small difference when tuned in different temperatures at 435 and 440 that everyone uses that. In other words, it’s tradition.”

“I see…”

“And of course not every instrument is concert pitched, so not everyone actually plays their A to tune-”

“What’s concert pitch? It’s different for different instruments?” Hinata’s genuine curiosity and eagerness to learn more about music shine through, and when he watches Kageyama explain all of these terms and conditions to him, he can see the way his face reflects just how much he cares about the topic. Music is the one thing Kageyama has been doing all his life, it’s the one thing he knows the most about and even though he’s being made to spill all of this information in the middle of what’s supposed to be a rehearsal, he looks happy to be able to talk and share what he knows.

“Well, the way some instruments are designed, their range doesn’t allow for an A on that instrument to be the same as an A in concert pitch. String instruments, pianos, flutes, oboes; they’re all concert pitch. But an instrument like clarinet will play a B, because all of the notes are a step up on the clarinet.”

“That’s so cool!” He exclaims, nearly knocking over his music stand when he moves forward. “I never would have guessed that they’re different!”

“Now can we get back to rehearsal?” Kageyama asks with a raised eyebrow as he picks his bow up from his lap. The intensity that Hinata develops when he plays has returned, he can tell by the way his eyes seem to flash to life. Though they have their differences, learning about music is something of that ties them together, excites and motivates them until it’s all they want to do to let it consume them.

“Yes!”

It’s on this Friday night that Hinata stays up, sitting on his bed with a laptop in front of him, looking up music scores for “flute/cello duets.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Saturday morning brings with it a slight chill with the breezes that blow through Kageyama’s short black hair as he walks down quiet sidewalks with his cello case strapped on his back, making him sway with each step. The black jacket of the “Karasuno Chamber Music Group” keeps him warm as he moves one hand to protect his nose from the bite of the wind. It’s cooler in the shade along the line of trees lining the sidewalk, he notes, and makes a point to find a spot in the park where he can sit in the sun.

The walk from his house isn’t a long one, but the weight on his shoulders starts to make them ache as he gets closer. He hoists his thumbs under the straps to adjust it as he climbs the short set of steps up the hill where the park trail begins. There are a couple younger kids playing basketball in the fenced-off court as he walks by, and a couple of them stop and stare curiously at him as he walks by. He steps on sand thrown onto the trail from the volleyball area not too far away, and then on mulch from the playground farther down the path. Kageyama spots a park bench a little ways away where there aren’t many people around, there’s a clearing from the trees and the sun is shining down there, and the space around it is all open grass where he’s run around before as a child, playing tag with whoever his mother had sent him on a ‘playdate’ with, and then when they played hide and seek he would leave and listen for a guitar, or a flute, or a cello being played nearby, and he would plant himself in front of whoever happened to be playing and just watch for a while. Though his play partner would usually get mad at him for it, he didn’t care.

It was on a trip like that when he was five that he found a cellist in the park, practicing, and he went and sat on the bench beside them to listen. They looked like they were in high school, not that he could really tell, because anybody older than junior high looked like an adult to him, but he sat silently and listened to them play for a long time, watched the way they played and found the bow strokes captivating him like hypnosis, and when his mother finally found him there, watching this cellist, he told them that he wanted to do that too, told his mother that he wanted to play the big string instrument that was yet too big for him. When his mother got him his first tiny cello, he was ecstatic.

Kageyama takes the cello case off his shoulders and lays it down in front of the bench, where the little bit of grass separates it and the path, takes out the endpin stop and pushes it into the soft grass so that it won’t move when he places the cello between his legs and pulls out the bow. He quickly tunes the strings, letting the acoustics of outdoor playing greet him. It’s different than playing indoors in a practice room, or an auditorium, or in his bedroom. It’s more open, there’s less echo, and it’s public - everybody nearby is likely to hear, but that’s why he wants to do it. He wants to inspire like that other cellist did when he was five, wants to be able to make that spark happen for somebody else, too.

He plays Bach’s Toccata, then the opening to William Tell, Saint-Saens Swan them from the Carnival of the Animals, anything he’s played in the past and has memorized. A few of the passersby stop to listen for a while before moving on, sitting on the other accompanying benches and having idle conversations with the cello in the background. Pieces he’s heard before he tries to replicate by remembering the pitches, plays Hinata’s Moldau this way, remembering Hinata’s notes in his head and replicating them with his own notes on the cello. The Moldau is a piece he’s listened to and admired before, but hadn’t had the urge to actually sit down and learn.

It’s when he starts playing the Miaskovsky that a boy with bright eyes and brighter silver hair waves to him from down the trail, calling his name loud enough to get his attention. He trots over to the bench in the sun, smiles brightly, and sits down next to him, carefully avoiding the cello case in the grass in front of Kageyama. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here,” he says after putting his bow down, using the interruption as an opportunity to stretch.

“It’s a nice day, I figured I’d come out and walk around for a while. Sometimes it’s fun to play volleyball with the kids who come here, I used to do that a lot when I was younger.” Without the cello playing through the park, the sounds of nearby birds and cicadas drift in and out like the wind that makes them shiver.

Two of the children that Kageyama had seen earlier when he first walked into the park, ones who were playing basketball, run up to them as Suga crosses his legs and leans back. There’s a little girl with dark brown pigtails and mud-stained clothes, holding the basketball under her little arm, and the other is a little boy in just about the same condition. Kageyama would guess they’re twins. “Your music is really good!” Exclaims the girl, bouncing a little in front of him. “Can you play more?”

He nods to her and pulls the bow back into his hand, thinking for a moment before starting Bach’s Cello Suite in G major, the Prelude. It’s a famous movement, one that moves quick enough to make the two smile at each other and watch him intently as he plays the jumps, and short enough that their amazement doesn’t fade. Suga, sitting beside him, closes his eyes and lets the music ring through him. Kageyama seems satisfied when he finishes with a dramatic lift of his bow, like he’s putting on a show for his audience of two. They clap for him, thank him for playing with little bows, and then run off yelling things about how they want to tell their dad about the cellist in the park.

“You know,” Suga starts, snapping Kageyama out of his daze as he watches the two run off, chasing the ball that had fallen out of the girl’s grip, “you amaze me every time you play.”

He blinks a couple times, fiddling with the bow still in his hand. “Oh. Thank you.”

“The piece you were playing when I came up, that was the piece I gave you, right? How is it going?”

“I like the Miaskovsky a lot.” The darker tones of the song were the first things that caught his attention when he pulled it out the first time, and when he listened to a recording of it later he was struck by the piano chords that accompany it. “Why did you pick it?”

“Oh no reason,” he says with a shrug, playing with his fingers out of habit. “I thought it’d showcase your sound… or something like that. Plus, I like the piano part.” The smile on Suga’s face is hard to see from the glare of the sun in his eyes.

“I thought I heard The Moldau coming from somewhere, too, was that you?” Suga asks, and when Kageyama nods he does as well. “I thought so. You have perfect pitch, don’t you? I could tell by the way you mimicked Hinata’s playing. That’s an amazing gift to have, it’d probably help a lot of the other club members if you’d play with them.”

“Really?”

“Mm hmm. You managed to help Hinata a lot. whenever he’d come to me for lunch lessons to learn the notes, I could tell he was improving a little more, even without my help. Even Asahi would probably appreciate playing with you sometime. You both could learn something.”

“Wouldn’t that mean I would take them away from you, though? You seem to know how everyone practices best.”

“Oh no, no,” he laughs out, waving him off. “I have my hands so full as it is, you’d be helping me out. Besides, with your observation skills, you’ll pick up on how they learn pretty quickly. You’ve already done that for some of your classmates, haven’t you?” There’s a knowingness and experience in Suga’s voice that makes Kageyama believe that he already knows the answer to that question.

“Watching from the sidelines can be a very powerful thing,” the pianist says as he stands and stretches, turning back to Kageyama as he remains there, bow tapping on the side of the cello. “You’ll help him, right?”

There’s a pause that makes Kageyama feel constricted, like he can’t move, but Suga’s gaze isn’t heavy or malicious, it’s almost pleading. “You’ll help Hinata when he comes to you for help?”

“Yeah, of course I will.”

The sun isn’t shining as harshly on them now, and Kageyama can see him clearly when Suga’s lips curl up in a small smile and he waves with a quick flick of the wrist. “I’ll see you on Monday, then.”

Kageyama is left feeling like he can’t breathe under the uncertainty from that last question. _“You’ll help him, right? You’ll help Hinata when he comes to you for help?”_ If his life were a story, Kageyama would feel like he’s caught in a foreshadow.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The week that follows is an exhausting one that leaves Suga and Daichi tiredly doing homework on the floor of Daichi’s room one Saturday later. They sit with blankets over their shoulders that occasionally fall off and knock papers off of the little table, scattering them all over the place. It turns into a game to get all of the papers back in their places, and Suga finds it so fun that he ends up doing it on purpose a couple times before Daichi gets frustrated and tears the blanket off of him, throwing it across the room and sending the other into a fit of laughter.

A lot has happened to the little chamber club over the course of five days. For starters, Hinata approached Suga on Monday morning and told him that he’d be playing the 6 Metamorphoses. Suga had told him that he’d be willing to help him whenever, but Hinata just shook his head.

“I’m gonna learn this one on my own! You already did so much to help me learn the notes and everything, I’ll be fine,” he had said before scurrying away to his own room to practice. From the main room, Suga could hear him stopping and starting again in an effort to learn the fingerings and how they flow into each other. Suga didn’t know whether to be relieved or upset. Sometimes he heard the door open, followed by the quiet patter of feet and another door hinge squeak. A couple minutes would go by, and then he would walk back, and the playing would resume.

Daichi started getting food for the club members after the rehearsals started getting longer, not that they needed to. There weren’t any performances in their near future, but the musicians found themselves getting sucked into the music and staying later. They would all go down to the corner store at the bottom of the hill and get pork buns, and then they head their separate ways.

Takeda told the group that he has been searching for a music instructor for the club, somebody to mentor them after school between when they see their own private teachers, since Takeda knows nearly nothing about music as it is. This excites mainly Hinata, who is the only one in the club who doesn’t take private lessons from somebody. On top of all of this, Asahi and Noya are also both back in the club, which has produced a more positive result than either Daichi or Suga could have hoped for.

Nishinoya’s enthusiasm and confidence is something that the first years are slowly picking up themselves, Tanaka has somebody to keep him busy when he isn’t practicing, and Asahi is back in an environment that welcomes him. He was anxious and timid at first, even after his performance with Nishinoya, but he opened up soon enough. Hinata especially brought the best out of Asahi, with all of his questions and his persistent effort. With all of this happening at once, the two third years ended up getting a little overwhelmed, but the weekend is already helping them reclaim their footing.

“Done!” Suga announces and loudly places his pencil down on the table.

“Oh man, I forgot you work so damn fast,” Daichi huffs, continuing to scribble something down in his English notebook. After he puts all of his papers away and pushes his stuff off to the side, making everything look a lot clearer (how much stuff did he even have out?), Suga stretches out his back, wincing a little at the tight pull of the muscles under his clothes.

He gets up and grabs a change of clothes from a bag in the corner of the room, then leaves with a call of, “I’m changing out of this ridiculous thing,” and then closes himself off in the bathroom for a couple minutes to change. When he comes back, Daichi is still hunched over an English problem and Suga is wearing a t-shirt that’s too big for him and bunches up at his hips. His pajama pants are old, Daichi can tell by the fact that they’re purple and covered in pastel cupcakes, but they obviously still fit, which is a good enough reason to keep them. He plops himself down on the edge of Daichi’s bed and watches his back, bent painfully over, as he keeps working.

Not ten minutes later, Suga starts to get bored, swinging his feet over the edge of the bed and kicking Daichi in the back a couple times with soft socked feet. He makes a point to not hit him every time his feet go back and forth, but it goes on for long enough that Daichi turns around, only to be greeted with an innocent smile and a giggle. With a groan he turns back around to work, but then Suga is making _noises_ and it’s _annoying_ and _hard to focus, god Suga, stop whining._

They’re mostly just sighs and huffs and hums, but eventually he starts whistling the beginning of Farandole and Daichi throws his own blanket at him just to get him to shut up. “Give me like ten minutes, jeez,” he snickers, because Suga’s endless stream of laughter is so contagious. At least the laughing is less annoying than basically everything else Suga was doing to try to get his attention.

There’s a point when Suga just takes out his phone and plays some Angry Birds, because despite the amount of time it’s been out, he still hasn’t beat the stupid thing, and he keeps downloading all of the other versions of it to keep himself busy, but even that doesn’t stop him. He doesn’t want to play Angry Birds on his phone, he wants to play something with Daichi. It’s been a long week and he wants to do something exciting, so he decides he’s going to speed things along himself. When he hops off of the bed and leans over Daichi’s shoulder to help him with his work, Daichi sighs, because he realizes this is a battle he’s not going to win.

“It’s ‘Koushi helps Daichi finish his homework’ time,” he tells the boy below him on the floor, who’s trying desperately to keep his pencil out of Suga’s grasp as he reaches for it. Suga decides to give up on the pencil, but nearly ends up sitting in Daichi’s lap when he seats himself next to the other on the floor. “What are you doing?”

“English, come on I don’t need this.”

“Yes you do. Also, number four is wrong,” he replies as he pulls the paper towards himself. Daichi could probably finish the homework pretty quickly without the “help” that Suga is set on providing, but he doesn’t mind the attention.

“You know, if the others knew how you act when you’re just with me, you wouldn’t be the club’s angel child, you know that, right?” Daichi swats Suga’s hand away from his pencil again.

“Oh come on, they don’t call me that in the first place. Besides, that’s just me doing my job as a good senpai.” One more question to go, he can do this. “Actually, I’m technically your senpai, too.”

“Koushi, shut up.”

“Since I’m six months older than you, maybe I should be treating you like one of my kohais, too.”

“For the love of all that is good, stop talking and let me finish this problem.”

“I know you like me better like this, though, so I won’t.”

“I’m finished! Now you can stop talking!” Daichi quickly shoves all of his things away and stands up, stretching out his back and letting out a sigh of relief.

Suga is over at the TV in an instant, going through the drawer of games until he finds the one he’s looking for, pulling out a copy of “Just Dance 2” and holding it out in front of him, waiting for Daichi’s approval. The answering expression is almost pained, but then he takes the box from Suga’s hands and puts the game in his system.

“You’re gonna owe me for playing this with you,” he mutters as he shoves the Wii remote into Suga’s hand, putting in the disc.

“If you didn’t want to play, you wouldn’t have gotten the game,” Suga says simply, starting up the game as Daichi stands and takes his place next to him. He scroll through the games, listening to the brief intros and finally picking one of the duet songs.

“Why this one, oh god.”

“Sway is my favorite, shut up, you’re playing with me.” The music starts and they get into position. Suga picks the female part because he’s smaller, and he’s been doing it for long enough that it’d be weird to change it. Suga remembers when Daichi got the game for Christmas because it’s music-based, and Suga made him stay up until three in the morning playing, which was long enough for Suga to memorize all of his own positions.

“Koushi, I swear, if you start singing again-”

“When marimba rhythms start to play, dance with me, make me sway,” he sings anyway, and at least it’s good for making Daichi laugh. “Daichi, if you don’t sing, what’s the point? Come on!”

Somehow Daichi takes that to heart and actually does start singing with him, but they both start laughing at each other because there is a reason they aren’t in the choral group, or in dancing. Daichi ends up tripping over himself multiple times during the song, while Suga keeps dancing and singing and giggling at him. The crosses go fairly well until Daichi messes up a move and falls a beat behind, and when they go to put their hands up he goes to move across and ends up with a face full of Wii remote.

“Daichi!” he yells, the game continuing to play in the background as Daichi lands on the floor with a thud, face stinging. Suga put a lot of force behind his swing, apparently, because he knocked the poor boy falling backwards right off his feet.

“Shit, Kou,” he says, holding his face, and Suga kneels in front of him for a moment, looking around almost desperately for something to pop out at him and tell him what to do, before he springs up and runs out of the room. Daichi can hear his footsteps down the stairs, and then they’re coming back, and Suga rushes in with an ice pack.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean for that to happen,” he says nervously, putting the pack up against Daichi’s face. He’s definitely going to have a black eye.

“I know, fuck, that really hurt.” Suga busies himself with turning the game off before kneeling in front of Daichi again.

“I’m so sorry,” he says again, quietly, inspecting Daichi’s face. It’s already red from both the impact and the ice.

“I know, it’s okay, calm down. I’m fine.”

“I hit you in the face with my remote, though,” he says with a small laugh that ends up relieving the tension from the room.

“You’ve done worse, I promise,” he jokes. “Remember that time you sent me flying off the swing in the park, and I broke my arm and couldn’t play.”

“I’m trying so hard to forget.” Suga moves to sit beside him, pushing hair out of his face and wishing he had some of his clips.

“At least it’s just my face. Though I guess I’ll have to get back at you some way or another. Depriving the world of this level of handsome?” Daichi gestures to his face. “That’s a crime.” The remark gets him nearly shoved over, but it’s worth it.

“More like a blessing,” Suga retorts, hiding his face behind his arms because he’s expecting the other to do something back, but he doesn’t, just smiles fondly at him while they sit on the floor of his room, faces red for different reasons. Suga feels hot and embarrassed, which is only amplified by the way Daichi is looking at him.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” the pianist starts with a matter-of-fact tone and his arms crossed over his chest, “but our club captain is currently crushing on somebody.”

“Where the hell did that come from?” Daichi nearly screams. “What makes you think that, anyway?”

“It’s the way you act, obviously,” comes the reply, completely skipping over the first question. “You didn’t seem focused when you ran into me-”

“When you _hit_ me,” he corrects.

“You’ve been acting the same way during rehearsals. So, am I right?”

“Well, yeah, I guess you’re right,” he answers, but there’s a strain in his voice that makes Suga think that he isn’t so sure about what he’s saying.

“And…. let me guess…” There’s a pause as Suga makes it look like he’s thinking, tapping his chin inquisitively and looking up at the ceiling.

“Is it me?”

The way Daichi nearly chokes on nothing sends Suga into a fit of giggles, because the clarinetist looks flustered in a way he’s never seen.

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding!” Suga exclaims between gasps, and the other boy starts to calm down.

Of all the things Suga expected to come out of this, what happens is nowhere close.

Suga doesn’t expect Daichi to drop the ice to the floor and put his hands, one burning hot and the other icey cold, on the side of his face,

He didn’t expect Daichi to learn forward until their noses touch and he can feel the tickle of breath on his lips.

He didn’t expect Daichi to kiss him, and most of all, he didn’t expect himself to react, but here he is, hands hovering on either side of the stronger body in front of him, not knowing what to do except to kiss back.

When they pull apart and two sets of brown eyes meet each other, they both look equally as shocked, but if the way they both burst into laughter and collapse against each other is any clue, all in all, it’s a good night. Downstairs, the radio that Mrs. Sawamura keeps in the kitchen is playing the Saint-Saens Op. 167 loud enough to be heard in the bedroom, and they think that fits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the lack of actual playing in this chapter ?? this was mostly for build, and the next chapter will be too, but now I know where I'm going and some pretty dramatic things are about to happen!!


	5. You Will Find Me Here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hinata runs up first to write down his piece; the first three movements of the 6 Metamorphoses. He's confident that he can learn that much in a month, he hopes that he can learn that much in a month, and zips away afterwards to return to the practice room, shutting the door behind him properly this time, and starting up a recording.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is a long time coming, I've been fighting some major writing block, but here it is!!
> 
> Also I'd like to share a few things! First is Kai's amazing art of Hinata and Kageyama which you can look at and appreciate here: http://transolaf.tumblr.com/post/106926556200/tumblr-post-of-the-fanart-i-did-for-oboisthinata  
> The second is a playlist dedicated just to pianist Suga, if you want to give that a listen: http://8tracks.com/shegry/don-t-have-to-change
> 
> Enjoy!!

Once the new week begins and everybody starts showing up for morning rehearsal, it’s evident how antsy the musicians are getting for somewhere to perform. Even those who don’t frequent the limelight are hoping for a chance to play in the near future. They deserve it, they’ve all been working hard outside of their school classes, coming in early and leaving late with market food and aching limbs from practice. When they aren’t rehearsing possible performance pieces with their partners (or with themselves), they’re reading from lesson books on scales and arpeggios, improving their overall abilities in lieu of over-practicing with each other. Hinata has gotten into the habit of bringing a tiny set of speakers into his practice room to rehearse with, has downloaded orchestral pieces onto it to learn by ear, and uses it as a timekeeper when he practices anything else. He finds himself in the practice room alone more and more often.

Takeda doesn’t show up to Monday’s practice until club activities after school, and even as he pushes the doors open, panting as if he’d just ran from one end of the Miyagi prefecture to the other, he’s still late. Daichi and Suga, who are still in the main club room, look to him with questioning stares as he catches his breath and waves a piece of paper back and forth in front of himself.

“You’ll never believe what just happened,” their advisor says as he walks up to the two third years and places the paper on the piano in front of them. “I’ve been calling around to people all day, and finally got you guys a competition.”

Hinata, who hasn’t yet started playing, hears the commotion in the main room and cracks his door open just a bit to listen in.

“A competition?” the two upperclassmen prompt in unison; in his practice room, Hinata perks up as well.

“Yeah, it’s at a school in Tokyo. It’s a general chamber competition, so I hear.” Takeda points to the paper he’d plopped onto the piano; there isn’t much information, just where it’ll be and what the scoring will be like.

“It’s at Nekoma,” Daichi points out as he reads over it. “Karasuno hasn’t gone to Nekoma for a competition in a long time.”

“I heard that the competitions at Nekoma were always intense! Once I got on the line with their head of music, it didn’t take as much effort as I thought it would to get us accepted. Your competitions were basically famous.” Takeda is excited; it’s obvious he’s done his research.

“Sensei…. You didn’t beg did you?” The concern on the boys’ faces makes their teacher throw his his hands up in defence.

“No! Well… no I didn’t!”

Thinking better than to stay on their current topic of discussion - and also thinking that he and Daichi really ought to get working on something now that they know a competition is coming up - Suga gets back on the track of their previous conversation. “Is there anything you need from us right now?” he asks, to which Takeda responds by pulling out another sheet of paper, a blank one this time.

“I just need the names of the pieces and who’s playing them,” he says as he rifles through his pockets for a pen. Hinata quickly and quietly closes the door so that nobody suspects he was listening.

The third years nod and hurry off to fetch everyone from the practice rooms. They’re met with, “But we just started!” and, “What is it now?” but it thankfully doesn’t take ages to get everybody assembled in one place. Shimizu has taken up helping Takeda write everyone’s names on his paper, and they’re done by the time everyone gathers around.

Takeda, who hasn’t done much speaking to the group, starts to look a little insecure under all of their gazes, but his initial excitement is still there. He stands as tall as he can surrounded by students who are heads above him.

“Hey, everyone,” he starts in an effort to be casual. “After a bit of prodding I was able to get us a spot in the Nekoma Chamber Music Competition in Tokyo a month from now. Uh, it’s a general competition, so they’re asking for solos or groups of six players or under.” Shimizu leans over and whispers something to him, to which the teacher nods. The students exchange curious glances as he continues.

“You guys are kind of a small group, so numbers shouldn’t be a problem."

"At Nekoma?" Asahi's voice cuts through from the side of the group.

"Didn't Karasuno use to visit them in the past?" The first years turn to Tanaka in curiosity, intrigued by the mention of this 'Nekoma' and all past recollections of them.

"Yeah, a couple years ago," their captain supplies. There's a chorus of "oo"s from the group.

"There will be a lot of other Tokyo schools there, too," Takeda says over the collective excitement. "I heard there's a nationally-ranked duo in one of them... I think the school is Fukurodani?"

Hinata jumps in place, nodding; that school name was familiar to him. "I know the bassoonist from there! He's the one who made fun of me for my sightreading."

"I just need to know what everybody is playing. I have a paper." He holds said paper up to show the students, the one with all of their names that Shimizu helped him write down.

Hinata runs up first to write down his piece; the first three movements of the 6 Metamorphoses. He's confident that he can learn that much in a month, he _hopes_ that he can learn that much in a month, and zips away afterwards to return to the practice room, shutting the door behind him properly this time, and starting up a recording.

Suga tells Kageyama that he'd like to play the Miaskovsky piece for the competition, so Kageyama writes it down for them. Kinoshita and Narita write down the name for the French Horn and Trombone duet they've been practicing, Daichi and Ennoshita put down their Sonatina, and Asahi, Noya, and Tanaka have a trio of their own that they write on the sheet.

Takeda looks over the sheet of names as all of the students return to their practice room, though Kageyama and Suga stay in the main room to use the grand piano instead of one of the uprights in the smaller practice spaces. Tsukishima and Yamaguchi haven't left yet. When he notices the two boys still standing about, he walks up to them; Shimizu had gone off to help the second year brass duo, and the collaboration between the other two is hushed.

"Are you going to be playing, too?" he asks when the musicians make no effort to speak up.

Yamaguchi looks to Tsukishima for direction, but the violinist is looking down at the teacher with an unreadable expression, and Yamaguchi is lost. Tsukishima's emotions are like the music he plays: usually predictable, sometimes unexpected, arrogantly simple, and written so plainly across him that anybody can tell what he's thinking. But now, standing in the middle of the club room face-to-face with the faculty advisor they haven't yet had an actual conversation with, Tsukishima's facade is an unknown in familiar territory.

"Yes," is his answer as he takes the paper and writes the name down in silence then hands it back. Before Yamaguchi has a moment to catch up with what happened, he has to catch up with Tsukishima, who's already halfway to the practice room. With a final glance back at their teacher, the violist follows Tsukishima out of the main room to leave Takeda with a confused expression and a quiet piano melody.

 

 

* * *

 

 

With the knowledge of an upcoming performance looming over them, the upperclassman decide they need to really get to practicing; but they also decide they don't want to sacrifice their lunches to do it, especially with the weather warming up and a cool breeze blowing through. The second and third years - minus the two brass players - all meet during their lunch period to eat together on the roof, like Daichi and Suga used to do before they were met with hectic underclassmen.

They're sitting in a sort-of-circle, with the three third years sitting across from the three second years, Noya basically hanging off of Asahi's side and Tanaka placed between the two clarinetists so that they can keep him in line.

“Look, all I’m saying is that our piece is really rad. Asahi is killing it with the cello part, and Noya- oh man, he’s like a walking metronome.”

“That’s not true,” Asahi murmurs as he waves his free hand out in front of himself dismissively. “I’m just the supporting part.”

“Don’t start with this again.”

Suga smacks Daichi on the arm for that comment before turning the other direction and giving their cellist a smile warm enough to melt snow and make flowers grow. “Everyone needs a little support,” he says, and Asahi’s cheeks get one shade darker.

“Tanaka’s right, though! The Reicha will put those city kids in their place.” Tanaka and Nishinoya both look at each other like they’re about to do a dramatic rendition of their parts, but both are stopped by Ennoshita’s very exasperated sigh and his hands on their shoulders.

“Please don’t start.”

The group will give the two points for the synchrony of their “aww.”

They take a comfortable moment to make progress on their lunches, letting the bustle of their surroundings provide enough noise to tie them over until the conversation starts up again.

“I take it all of the pieces are going well, then?” Suga asks as he pokes at his rice. As per usual, his first reply comes from Noya.

“You bet! How do you always manage to pick the best music? Do you have some sort of superpower?”

“Yeah, we still have a lot to work on, but seriously man, this music is amazing,” Tanaka says with a mouthful of broccoli.

“Narita and Kinoshita told me the piece you picked for them is pretty cool,” Ennoshita offers casually, and Suga looks content with that. “Have you heard anything from the first years?”

“Well, my duet with Kageyama is going really well, he’s a natural. I need to look at my part more.” Suga’s inflection drips with a jealousy that was unintentionally implied. “I don’t hear much from Hinata, though.”

After finishing a piece of fish, Asahi adds, “I hear him leaving his practice room sometimes, but only for a moment. Then the door closes again.”

“What about Tsukishima and Yamaguchi?” Daichi asks.

“I don’t even know what piece they’re playing.” The group looks to Suga in disbelief, who shrugs and continues. “They wanted to do their own piece, and they didn’t tell me what it is.”

“I guess we’ll hear it at the competition, then,” Noya concludes, then reaches over to Asahi’s lunch and takes one of his tomatoes, which earns him a look from both Ennoshita and Daichi, but the cellist just lets it happen.

“I wanna hear how well that piece goes for Hinata when he plays,” says Tanaka as he closes his lunch and puts it away. “The shrimp is impressive, but isn’t Britten a little much?”

“I don’t think so.” Suga looks thoughtful. He’s considered everything when looking for pieces for the club members - skill, style, the musician’s drive - he wouldn’t have given the oboist that music if he didn’t think he could do it. “We’ll have to find out for ourselves, yeah?”

 

 

* * *

 

 

There’s a knocking on Kageyama’s practice room door. That’s the fifth time today, and he can’t even remember what number this week. It’s always the same three-knock refrain, quiet but forceful, and it’s giving Kageyama a headache. He want’s to tell him to go away, but at the same time he knows he can’t; he’s on his feet and moving to open the door before he can stop himself.

“What is it now?” he scolds as Hinata shuffles into the room, music and oboe in hand. It’s nearing the end of the rehearsal, and it’s already Thursday afternoon. Kageyama doesn’t have time for Hinata to be interrupting all the time, and Hinata certainly doesn’t have time to spare, either.

“Can you stay after rehearsal to practice with me next week?”

“Don’t answer my question with another question.”

“How about Tuesday? Can you stay after school on Tuesday?”

“What the hell? Probably, Why do you want me to stay after practice? That’s what they’re for.”

“Maybe…” Hinata says slowly, like somehow the idea of rehearsals don’t also include rehearsing. “I want to play with you. But afterwards.”

“Your endurance is amazing,” Kageyama mutters in utter disbelief. Practices are an hour long after school, and he knows that’s stretching wind players to their limits.

“You still didn’t answer my question.”

“Fine. Yeah, I’ll stay after rehearsal next Tuesday. Is that all you wanted?”

Hinata shuffles anxiously, taking a stand from the corner of the room and placing it in front of Kageyama, but leaving it to face himself. He places the music he’d brought in onto the stand and moves it around a bit. “I want you to listen to the first movement of the 6 Metamorphoses.”

The cellist sighs and moves his cello out of the way so that he can sit down and listen. “Go for it,” he says, hoping his annoyance will somehow get through thick orange curls and into Hinata’s head.

The first movement, entitled Pan, was written as a representation of the god “who played upon the reed pipe which was Syrinx, his beloved.” Each movement represents a different Roman entity, and the first gives way to a free and expressive interpretation of what may seem like a random slew of sound. It was written without a key signature, leaving all but the order of the notes to the musician.

The first thing Kageyama notices when Hinata starts playing is that he’s timid, too much so for a solo piece centered around a free spirit. The piece sounds more like a shy nymph’s song than the anthem for a god of wild things. He lets him play, though.

The sound morphs to Hinata’s sway, catches in his missed notes, and stalls in his hesitation. During pauses in the score, he takes a moment to breathe, but the moments are longer than Kageyama remembers him ever needing before, and he can tell it isn’t a stylistic choice. For such a short movement, he feels like he’s been listening and inspecting for a lifetime. Britten’s Metamorphoses is a piece he’s familiar with, and never before has he been so caught up in it that he can’t remember where the oboe is in the music.

The trill at the end is the signal that the movement is over, and though he can’t remember having gotten lost, suddenly Kageyama knows exactly where he is, and where Hinata is, and so he stands to acknowledge him.

“Your style is terrible,” he begins, not holding back because he knows the oboist isn’t one to sugarcoat, either. “It’s too timid. If you want to play a solo piece like this it needs to reflect that.”

_Right now it just sounds like you’re waiting for an accompanist who will never show, and you and I both know that you can’t be dependant forever._

Kageyama takes the music and puts it down on the stand in front of his chair, retrieves his cello, and waves him over. “You need to play it like this.” In a moment Kageyama is transposing the first movement to his own key, and playing it with a completely different style than the other first year had been using just a moment ago. Kageyama’s cello floats like air while Hinata’s rose in unnatural ways, but it still isn’t right - Britten didn’t write for cello, the music is an oboe solo, so there isn’t much besides playing with different phrasing that Kageyama can do to help.

Halfway through his demonstration, something seems to startle the oboist, and the music is gone from the stand, there’s a fast, “Thank you!” and Hinata is out the door.

There isn’t any playing from that practice room for the five minutes that follow, as the cellist sits in the silence of the room until he hears a knock on the door. A double knock, soft and resounding. Rehearsal is over, and Kageyama understands.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Yamaguchi cares most about music, and about blossoming tulips, and about warm afghans and kotatsus in winter when that’s all he has to keep himself warm. On Friday as he walks home from school, after he and Tsukishima have split up, he sees buds along windowsills and imagines how they will look in a week when he walks by again. As he watches the clouds shift in the sky and make obscure shapes, his iPod changes songs.

Among Mozart, and Bach, and Holst, and Piazzolla, there is also Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Angel of Music. He has translated it, sings it when he’s alone, listens to it as it cycles on, and thinks about it among the many other things he thinks about. One of his little earbuds threatens to fall from its place, so he pushes it back and and hums softly as the music fills him with memories and good feelings. He doesn’t use expensive headphones like Tsukishima, doesn’t find a need for their bulky presence, but listens when they’re placed on his head and lets the deep quality of sound overwhelm him until he can’t take it any more.

He kicks a pebble off the sidewalk, watches it land in the road as he steps slowly in time with what he hears, smiling fondly as a child and her mother walk by in an excited daze spurred on by nothing besides the lure of life and happiness. He steps carefully to Path of Wind and hums the viola solo in The Perfect Fool when it comes around and he’s watching birds in the trees in the neighborhood where he’s growing up.

The crack and snap of a fallen branch breaking beneath his feet makes him jump, and as he looks down to see what remains he carefully pushes it off to the side of the sidewalk so that nobody else coming through will trip on it. The leaves littered about his path are new and green, prematurely fallen from the limbs above where those of the same sort still hold strong to the tree and sway softly as the wind passes through. His viola case sways by his side as he continues home, walks up the cement stairs and opens the door quietly to call out, “I’m home.”

There’s an empty quietness in the house that makes his voice echo back, and as he removes his shoes and carries his things to his room, he takes advantage of the afternoon to set down his case and pull out the viola inside. He plays a song that remains a secret to all but Tsukishima, Takeda, and himself, lets forbidden chords flow under his fingers, and smiles when he remembers that the arrangement is his own.

 

 

* * *

 

 

A tiny radio playing scratchy music, muffled footsteps, branches tapping on glass windows: these are the familiar sounds of Sakanoshita, the foothill store at the edge of town. The rustle of newspaper pages flipping and an exhale of smoky breath are also among them, and when the little bell by the door rings and the bristles under the metal door frame drag against the floor, the clerk doesn’t even look up. Not until he hears that much-too-familiar, “Ukai-kun?”

With a groan, Ukai turns in his chair to face the front of the store, where Takeda is standing. “You again.”

Takeda walks up to the counter, feet squeaking quietly on the flooring until he can put his hands down on the countertop. “I came to ask about-”

“I know why you’re here,” Ukai cuts him off, putting out his cigarette and burying his face in his newspaper. “Like I told you the first hundred times you came in, I’m not interested. I ain’t some school teacher like you.”

“But these kids, they’re amazing,” Takeda asserts, trying for the umpteenth time to change his mind. He feels like a train going in circles around an endless track because he can’t quite reach the switch that will get him going forward instead of around in an infinite loop.

“But they’re still kids, and I don’t do kids. Sorry, but I can’t do it.”

“Ukai-kun, if you would just hear them play-”

“No,” he says sternly and turns his chair around so that he doesn’t have to see those glasses and ridiculous black hair any more.

“I can’t do anything for them, I’m only a Japanese literature teacher,” Takeda insists, leaning forward on the counter now that the clerk isn’t look at him any more.

“I know my grandfather may have been some prodigy, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna live up to his name, if that’s what you’re thinking. Give up already, will you?”

Of course he won’t do that.

“If you would just come listen to them, you’d understand. We have a competition at Nekoma in a little less than a month, and they could really use the help; there’s this oboe player who’s really good, but he doesn’t have any training and can barely read the notes,” the teacher rambles, not even realizing that Ukai had turned back around and placed the newspaper in front of him. “And the first year cellist- he’s a prodigy, I swear they’re worth it.”

“Hold on a sec,” Ukai says slowly, looking over the short man in front of him.

“What is it?”

“You said you’re going to Nekoma.”

“Yeah, I did…” Takeda hopes that he didn’t just say something that would ruin any chance of securing a coach for his ragtag team of musicians.

Ukai looks contemplative for a moment, doesn’t say anything to Takeda as he stands there anxiously, but then dismisses him with the wave of his hand as he picks up his newspaper again. “You’ve got the wrong guy, the answer is still no.”

Takeda huffs in annoyance, but his persistence isn’t going to be shaken so easily, so even as he makes his way to the door, makes the bell above the frame ring as he takes a step forward, and can smell the flowers and warm winds of late spring, he adds, “I’ll be back.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Of all of the things that Yamaguchi would like to not be doing, standing quietly in the main room with Kageyama and Hinata while the upperclassmen are still going over trouble passages for the last five minutes of rehearsal takes the cake. He’s standing off to the side, near the chair where Tsukishima left his violin and bow as he was shuffled off with Nishinoya to discuss “something important.” If he hadn’t been dragged away by the other, more enthusiastic and apparently secretive violinist, Yamaguchi would feel a lot better about talking to (and most likely pestering) the other first years.

He had offered to put away the violin but Tsukishima had called to him and told him to just leave it, he’ll get it when he comes back out, so he’s staying close to make sure the strange duo’s mischief doesn’t result in anything terrible. All he can hear at the moment is bickering, so he carefully puts his viola away while he waits for the return of his duet partner and best friend. As he sticks the bow through the holder in the case, he wonders what Nishinoya could possibly want with Tsukishima, and more importantly, what Nishinoya wouldn’t want with himself.

He sticks his case beside the lone chair in the front of the room, where he assumes Kageyama had formerly been practicing beside the piano with Suga, and where Tsukishima’s now lies open, bow and violin laying across the open interior. He wonders if he should just do it anyway, but he also doesn’t want to touch the violin and have Tsukishima get mad at him, so he finds something else to do - anything else to do. Pacing seems to work for a while as he kicks his feet lightly against the carpet as he walks around, looking down and watching his heels brush the floor. It starts to not work so well when the other two decide to try and talk to him, not that he’s intimidated really, just a little out of his element. He likes Hinata, but Kageyama is a different story.

“Yamaguchi!” Hinata skips over and lands in front of him, made smaller by his bent position. The violist thinks it’s honestly kind of cute. “Kageyama and I have a question.”

“Oh?” Yamaguchi looks between the two with a confused curiosity as Kageyama walks over to stand beside the oboist.

“Why do you always hang out with Tsukishima?” Hinata asks with starry-eyed zeal.

“Well, Tsukki’s my best friend. That’s what best friends do.” Yamaguchi thinks he may have jumped to conclusions in his momentary state of panic, because he likes Hinata; Hinata danced with him in the club room when the upperclassman played improv jazz, runs into him in the hallways sometimes and tells him he can’t wait to see everyone at practice, has given him candy on multiple occasions when they passed each other at lunch. Because while Kageyama stands tall and dark and looming like the moon, Hinata is warm like solar flares and shooting stars.

“Oh yeah!” the oboist chimes, turning to Kageyama. “Daichi-san and Suga-san walk home together, too. They’re inseparable just like them.” Hinata points at Yamaguchi, who’s watching him with an amused half-smile.

“No, it doesn’t seem like that.” Kageyama’s music is the opposite of how the boy usually acts, fluid and natural, absorbing style and beauty as he plays to fit each piece differently; right now he’s stone cold and frightening like Liadov’s de l’Apocalypse, an unfinished piece that rumbles with timpani at the end and reminds Yamaguchi of a dormant volcano returning to life. “He’s not a good person, so why do you bother?”

“Hey,” Hinata says in a warning tone, but Kageyama takes a step closer, attempting to encourage an answer but only seeming forceful.

“Well he’s not a bad person, if that’s what you’re implying,” Yamaguchi counters, retaliating with his own step back, a step toward the middle of the room, toward the piano.

“He’s rude as hell, though.” Another step forward.

“You’re one to talk.” Another step back, his more timid.

Hinata tugs on Kageyama’s arm, trying to make him stop, but the cellist is unrelenting, and surges forward. “What did you just say?”

Yamaguchi didn’t realize he was already back where he started, back by the chair in the middle of the room sitting offset of the piano. When he moves his leg back and finds hard metal where there should be nothing, he feels himself falling and off balance, and reaches out to grab onto whatever he can.

The memory of the crack and snap of a fallen branch breaking beneath his feet makes Yamaguchi wince when he realizes that it’s a sound he hears at that moment, as he feels wood and velvet under his palm and his legs keep him in a half-kneel supported only by the hand he’s using for leverage.

The three of them make slow, careful, nervous movements. Yamaguchi stands and looks at the imprint in the heel of his palm and traces it with his fingers before looking down at the case in frozen terror. Yamaguchi has done exactly what he was afraid of Kageyama or Hinata doing, yells at himself for not putting the violin away in the first time. Sinking to his knees, he slowly takes the bow from the case and holds it in front of him. The wood is splintered where it broke toward the end, the only thing holding it together is the hair attached at both ends.

“Guys…” he chokes out, leaning back on his calves and holding the bow to his chest. Hinata approaches him slowly, but a practice room door opens and Nishinoya and Tsukishima walk out to find Yamaguchi on the floor with tears beginning to form on his cheeks and the other two first years looking scarred.

As soon as Hinata spots the violinists walking out, he starts frantically apologizing, moving to stand shielded behind Kageyama, who still hasn’t moved. Noya watches curiously from the piano as Tsukishima walks over to Yamaguchi, kneeling beside him with a raised eyebrow. He talks with a hushed voice as he tries to get Yamaguchi to open his arms and reveal what he’s hiding.

“What happened?” the violinist asks in a way that he has only ever used on weekends in empty houses or cemeteries or park band shells in the summer. It ghosts over his lips and forms sheets of fragile ice around him, like beautiful frozen crystals on bubbles that have frosted over from the cold, but it’s gentle and rare, and feels less like a chill and more like an embrace.

Yamaguchi is a mess and can’t form the words necessary to explain what had happened through broken gasps and tears that fall from his chin and land on his pants. He hands the two broken pieces of the bow to Tsukishima once he realizes there’s no running away from what’s in front of him, and when his arms are free he wipes his eyes on the sleeves of his uniform; they come away damp and so do his eyes.

“Calm down,” Tsukishima says with quiet crystals of ice forming on his words. “It’s just a bow, Yama, I can get another one. Stop crying.”

Yamaguchi expects to be called “pathetic” or “childish,” but he isnt. When Tsukishima stands with his bow hanging from his hand, everybody else has entered the main music room and is watching from the sides. Hinata is grabbing onto Kageyama’s arm out of fear, and though he still seems mortified, the cellist is trying to shake him off.

“What the fuck did you do?” Tsukishima yells pointedly at the duo as Yamaguchi gets up from his spot on the floor and walks quickly from them all, leaving his stuff and everybody but Suga, who follows him out, behind. Everybody else in the room pretends not to listen, huddles with their usual conversation groups, and makes small talk to look like they aren’t about to watch Hinata and Kageyama get scolded.

Hinata is ultimately the one who spills everything, because the little ball of light is also a ball of fear and nerves, and he can’t stand the guilt. “I asked Yamaguchi why he always hangs around you, and then he said because you’re friends, and then Kageyama said that there must be something else, and then Yamaguchi and Kageyama started fighting, and then Yamaguchi tripped on the chair because he was walking backwards and he tried to stay up but he landed on your bow and then it went ‘SNAP’ and then he started crying and you came out and we’re really sorry!” In one breath everything comes out and he bows apologetically to Tsukishima, who has an eyebrow raised disapprovingly at the explanation, but Hinata looks close to tears.

“What about you?” He asks to Kageyama, who is doing a lot of staring and not a lot of talking. “Why were you two even asking him about that? That’s none of your business. Keep your absurd comments to yourselves, why don’t you?”

“What-” Kageyama starts with a scowl etched across his now animated face, but he’s stopped by the main door opening again as Suga comes in, and Tsukishima decides he’s had enough of the conversation.

“I have to go get a new bow for the competition in a few weeks, try not to screw anything else up for the senpais while we’re gone,” he says coldly, but not cold like thin frozen sheets - cold like daggers of ice and frozen knives made for attacking and not for comfort. He puts his violin and broken bow away in his case, grabs both his and Yamaguchi’s bags, and carries both of the instruments out the door in a black fury that nobody else wanted to get caught in.

Kageyama and Hinata look between themselves in the aftermath of a hurricane of emotion and mistakes, and hope the tension pressing down on everyone like lead carts resting on their shoulders doesn’t last very long.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It’s awkward at first, when Hinata reminds Kageyama the next day that he still wants to practice with him after rehearsal, because they both still feel off about what happened the night before. They decide to do it during, instead, so as to not bother the third years with having to close up late, and because of the shaken feeling that surrounds the club room. Tsukishima and Yamaguchi seem to be closer, if anything, and the broken bow has already been replaced by a newer one, but it feels like there’s a gray haze floating about the club room and into the practice rooms, echoing in the keys of the pianos and leaving through carefully tuned strings.

When the duo finally gets inside and tune, they don’t bring up the events of the day before. They try to forget through warm up scales and fingering exercises until Kageyama can’t take it anymore and asks why Hinata was so determined to practice with him.

“I could be working with Suga-san on our piece.” Hinata is ruffling through his bag before the cellist has a chance to finish his sentence.

When he comes back and holds out a pile of sheet music with the title _Duo for flute & cello_ on the top of the first paper, Kageyama knows exactly what he got himself into when he had told Hinata the other week about concert pitched instruments.

“Please, Kageyama?” Hinata whines, as if he’s anticipating an outright refusal. “I really like the Danzi, will you at least play that with me?”

“You have other music you should be practicing, and so do I.”

“Please? I’ll keep oboing, and you can keep celloing, and Noya-senpai will keep violining, and we can play this piece and everything will be fine because we don’t always have to be playing competition music, right? Music should be fun. I think this will be fun.”

Though Kageyama wants to scowl at Hinata’s use of made-up verbs like “violining,” he puts the music up on his stand anyway and looks it over - it’s not technically difficult, and stylistically it shouldn’t be either, but he’s not worried about his own playing. He doesn’t want to spend an eternity waiting for the oboist to get all of the notes right before it will actually start being “fun,” like he wants it to be.

“I already practiced this music, so let’s do it,” Hinata says with all of his usual flare, turning his reed at the top of his oboe while he waits for his duet partner to give a nod to tell him he’s ready. When he hears a sigh and watches him pull his bow up to the strings, the tempo is set with a few nods of his head, he takes a deep breath, and they play.

Hinata has not only practiced the Danzi, he’s practiced every piece in the pile of duets that he handed to Kageyama, has listened to countless recordings and played along, learned the style and bounce of each note under his fingers as they resonate on his lips and through his body like a musical heartbeat. The Danzi Allegretto that they play is a bouncy song that can only be described as a dance between the two instruments, in this case an oboe and cello, which changes the tone from that of butterflies and cloudbursts to birds and sunflowers.

They play as though they’ve been dancing this summer tune for ages, matching note lengths and dynamic enthusiasm from the very first note. It sounds like something out of a movie soundtrack, like bright sun rays over trees on mountains high enough to guard secrets and runaway lovers.

Kageyama is enjoying himself, gets wrapped up in their unique sound once again, regards their unique instrumentation with a fondness that he knows he wouldn’t have been able to appreciate had he not come to Karasuno to play, and then is torn out of his image of leaves and lean-tos when he hears a sharp inhale above him.

There it is again, the shakiness of his breath and the way he doesn’t seem to sway with the same rhythm as before: these are the things that Kageyama noticed when Hinata had been playing Pan for him, but they are a lot more subtle now. _He’s not so proud that he’d put his playing above his health_ , Kageyama thinks, because Hinata makes no visible acknowledgement of his physical state of potential fatigue, so he doesn’t say anything.

But Kageyama doesn’t know that as Hinata inhales and moves fingers over metal keys, that the notes are not clear. He is bending his knees more, has backed up a fraction of a step to try to focus on the music in front of him, doesn’t want to rely on his muscle memory because it’s failing him, and in a flash of white everything is dark.

Kageyama watches as Hinata takes his reed out of his mouth one last time to breathe, never plays the next note because his knees are buckling and he’s falling to the floor and landing on his side before the cellist can get up fast enough to catch him. He goes into a panic, takes the oboe from Hinata’s hand and places it carefully on top of the upright piano in their frequented practice room, sets down his cello and bow, and runs out the door, scrambles through the main room until the pianist with bright silver hair hears and turns to see him standing behind him with a terror-stricken expression and an anxious stance.

“Hinata fainted.”

 

 


	6. Your Words are Like a Song

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Kageyama leaves the practice room, making sure to close the door securely behind him, he finds that half of the club is already standing in the main room with worried expressions littering their faces. He hadn’t realized how loud he’d been when he left to get Suga, and felt guilty now with Daichi, Ennoshita, Asahi, Noya, and Tanaka all watching him, probably looking for some sort of explanation.

Overused floorboards creak under tiny feet too young to understand what “quiet” means, and a door handle flies open with the aid of soft hands that are just as small and a jump high enough to mimic that of a cat’s. There’s a soft pattering down the hallway but rounded fingers are already pulling out a case covered in black leather with a hard handle that swings wildly as he holds it with the curiosity of a baby bird. It clatters to the floor with a crash, bumping into a side table and nearly knocking over a painted bowl, only to be caught by his mother.

“Shouyou, you shouldn’t be going through things that aren’t yours,” comes the soft and stern voice behind him, and as he turns to look at his mother standing there, he catches sight of the case that he’d recklessly pulled - or tossed, rather - out of the closet. Ignoring the scolding, he trots over to where it lays closed on its side.

“What’s this?” he asks as the handle moves helplessly in his hand.

Shouyou’s mother sighs instead of giving a reply, instead walking over to where he’s sitting on the ground trying to make sense of the hard material that _obviously_ must be holding something important. As soon as she makes it to him, Shouyou’s finger slips under the cold metal clasp keeping the case shut, and it flips open. Its contents are exposed before she can bend down and pull it to safety, and suddenly the boy is cooing over the black wooden instrument in front of him.

“That’s not yours,” she chides again, pulling the bell out of his hands before he gets his finger stuck in the key. In an instant the instrument is tucked neatly back into the velvet lining inside hard leather, the empty space in the closet has been filled once again, and the closet door gets closed. She pats him on the head as he sits on the floor and pouts quietly, then kneels beside him. “I’ll show you when you’re older, alright?”

Shouyou huffs and crosses his arms, ruffling up the skirt he’s wearing, which his mother promptly fixes. “How about we do something else, alright?” A mother always knows how to keep her little ones out of trouble. “Why don’t you come listen to me play piano downstairs?”

All at once the young destruction is forgotten in favor of a trip to the downstairs “music room,” the room with the upright piano and a bundle of pillows in the corner for when Shouyou begins to fall asleep to the soft sounds of Moonlight Sonata. The music stand to one side has been unused and haphazardly thrown there some time ago, seemingly out of place, but in a couple years time the lonely metal will once again be warmed with the sounds of flipping sheet music and the warm caress of oboe cadenzas.

* * *

Koushi’s fingers first feel the cold shock of piano keys as a toddler after having been outside as the spring weather chilled him to the bone, only to be warmed by piercing rays of sunshine. White socks slide quietly along hallway flooring lit by the same light, and he stops in one of the beams streaming in through a window to catch the heat on his skin. As he takes a detour into the spare room, he finds something familiar.

A hard black cover hides away the inner workings of long stretched metal strings that sound like cherry petals and the blue glow of midnight walkways. It’s a sound he’s played with many times before, the quiet sound of middle C as he presses a key and hopes not to disturb anyone else. He jumps up onto the bench, swings his legs over the side and giggles as he presses that same C again.

Played in two octaves this time, those C’s turn into G’s and A’s and E’s, and the first of Mozart’s 12 variations is parading through the room as his fingers march over cold piano keys. It’s such a simple piece, at least at the beginning. Everything seems to warm under his touch as the melody rings through the empty side room, and suddenly the swaying of the rosy trees outside seem to sync with the increasing pace of his song.

He grows up to this piece, constantly improving and perfecting, and in his sixth year he plays it for the first time in front of a group of parents and children who had all gathered to listen to relatives or just to pass the time. It’s in early spring when he first performs, and the sundress his mother makes him wear almost reflects the cherries he’d first seen when he learned the piece he’ll continue to keep with him as he gets older. Dotted with orange and yellow flowers, the dress flows and turns as he walks shakely to the piano, and the audience seems larger than it did when he was still spectating.

Hours seem to pass over seasons when he plays, and the once bright and early sky silhouetted with flying birds and falling petals shifts to a night sky lit with the brightest stars you’ll ever see, and after the recital, the little boy who compliments him tells Koushi that of all the stars, the most stunning one he saw was the one who had made all of the others come to life.

* * *

Shouyou is more eccentric than ever, and though he’s still young - only nine years old and still in primary school - many people know him and greet him as he rides down the street on his bike. From store owners to morning joggers to to people headed to work or to run errands, they always wave and Shouyou always waves back. Him and his curly ginger hair have become quite famous around town because with it always comes the personality of bubbles and baby feathers that everyone loves so much; he’s as unique and determined as any nine-year-old, and as he comes across a flyer for the Tokyo Quartet coming to perform a variety of pieces in a nearby city he promptly remembers all that he can to report it back to his mother when he gets home.

He spends the next couple weeks before the concert buzzing about how he’s going to see a famous group, both to his friends in school and at home. Though one of his two closest friends is an artist and the other a singer, they both get excited for Shouyou because that’s how Shouyou is, his energy bounces off of every nearby thing and radiates off of it. The week before, he accidentally answers “violin” when his teacher asks what a verb is.

It takes a little while to get to the performance hall where the concert is being held, and Shouyou nearly drives his parents off the walls on the way there. He bounces in his seat and makes a commotion, and when they finally make it inside to their seats, Shouyou can’t stay sitting for more than 20 seconds at a time. He’s awestruck by the size of the hall, by the amount of people who are filling in and taking up all of the space around him, and how the stage seems so frightening.

His mom finally gets him to sit down a couple minutes before the concert starts, and Shouyou’s eyes are glued to the stage the entire time. He watches as it transforms from being empty and desolate to bright and full of life just as the quartet steps onto the stage. They start the concert with a piece by a composer whose name he can’t pronounce (and who Shouyou simply calls “Shosty”), a piece in C minor that filled the hall with dark sounds that shrouds the performers in black, even though the lights in front of him are bright enough to highlight the captivated features of his face.

It shifts into intense and quick-paced rhythms not long after the beginning of the piece, and it throws the ball of bundled energy for a loop - how could a piece of music change so quickly and toss his emotions like a volleyball back and cross, and then suddenly cut out to a single violin, yet still keep the same frightening tone as it started with? He’s frozen in his seat until the very end, stunned and very much amazed with the music in front of him, and what the four string players are producing.

Even in unison octaves, Shouyou feels as though he’s floating, and sinking, and running, all at the same time. He’s being _moved_. Like a rocking pirate ship out on the sea while thunder crashes around, and like miners hitting a dead end in a death trap underground, he’s being moved.

The second piece they play is a piece by Tchaikovsky, a quartet in D major that sounds less like darkness and more like seaweed and coral and shifting sand into faults and onto sleeping crabs. It feels like shorelines and the push and pull of waves underwater when the water flows through untangled hair and makes wet limbs want to dance. It’s like volcanoes and aerial views and of never wanting to fall asleep because something important might happen, and it’s lulling but also aggressive in the way it doesn’t let go, draws you in until you’re surrounded by the music the same way you’d be surrounded by the sea.

They play shorter pieces, too, arrangements of pop songs that Shouyou’s only ever heard fragments of, but he knows enough to recognize the pieces, even if it’s only the chorus line. And then, just as he’s getting restless, they announce the final piece, a Barber piece in B minor that has dissonance that he’s never imagined, the way some of the chords sound so wrong that they sound right, and how standard chords appear to be out of place, incorrect. It’s quick like battlefields and predators, and doesn’t make him feel heavy or weightless like the other pieces did.

The second movement hits him like a cannonball from misfired cannons and sorrow like he’s never felt before. The battlefield transforms into a field of white curling grasses as winds blow ash across his mind and the feel of loss seems to overtake him, even though he has never lost something the way he’s made to feel he should have. The colors change from red to black and white and that dissonance from the first movement is nothing compared to the multitude of perfect chords and progressions and strong bowings he’s found himself engulfed in as he begins to tear up and forgets about the rest of the auditorium, like he’s sitting in the field himself and as the melody changes and drops, he feels like he’s falling, and the gentle mourning filling his ears and ringing like bells all around him pulls the tears out of him as if they were always meant to flow this way, in the presence of cellos that sound like loss and violins that sound like longing, and of the viola that played like galaxies moving overhead.

The short reprise of the first movement that follows isn’t enough to break Shouyou of his trance, and the final applause is lost to him as he stares at the musicians as they take their final bows and walk offstage. When his parents finally manage to pull him out of the hall to leave, he’s back to the way he was right before the concert started - awestruck and overwhelmed with excitement.

He starts asking for money for snacks on the way home from school, and as he passes everyone who knows him on his bike down the street, he continues to wave. After a few weeks of only eyeing the music shop on the side of the road, he stops there. When he gets home, the money that’s been building in his pocket is replaced with something new, and the closet in his house that has gone unopened since the incident with the side table years ago is once again opened.

* * *

After two years of playing, Koushi begins to dislike his piano instructor. He isn’t used to the strict kind of teaching style she implores once he gets a little older, and though he begins to show even steadier improvement as he learns new styles and pieces, it isn’t what he wants from his playing. If it weren’t for the recitals, he would consider dropping it, but Koushi finds that he enjoys sharing what he does with others. The boy from his first performance shows up again to the second, this time with a handful of handpicked flowers from what he assumes is the boy’s garden. Koushi doesn’t wear the blue dress from that recital ever again.

After four performances and even more flowers, Koushi finds out the boy’s name: Daichi. He also finds out they go to the same primary school, and so the two start talking more and more, and Daichi comes to more and more of his recitals, and always brings flowers, though they don’t come from his garden any more.

Every year Koushi’s mom buys him another dress for another recital, and every year he only wears them once before they’re stored and never to be worn again. Daichi begins to suggest piano sonatas he’s heard from other musicians, and when he takes up the clarinet in their last year before middle school, he starts coming over to practice. Though Daichi gets a teacher as well, Koushi still help him learn how to read the music easier. Koushi eventually finds a new piano instructor, one who is more patient and more enjoyable, and Koushi finds that he regrets ever considering stopping in the first place. The two of them don’t perform together in front of a group of people until later into middle school, but still Daichi attends every one of Koushi’s recitals, and Koushi’s mother begins to think of Daichi as part of the family. He does stop bringing flowers, though.

* * *

Shouyou discovers many things he hasn’t heard of before when he starts searching the internet. For example, it’s the first time he finds out that many oboe players make their own reeds. Since he’s already learned a plethora of oboe sonatas, solos, and melodic lines from the discs he’s picked up from the music store he now finds himself in quite often, he decides he should also start making his own reeds if that’s what “real” oboe players do.

The store clerk starts stocking oboe cane simply because Shouyou asks about it one day, and after a couple weeks Shouyou stops in and finds that it’s waiting for him on the counter when he walks in. He’s stopped asking for snack money since his mother has figured out that he plays in his free time, and so she gives him what he needs to buy the supplies for his new task: learning how to make the reeds himself.

With the help of a few YouTube videos and countless failed attempts at wrapping and accidentally shaving off a corner or taking too much off of the back, he finally manages to make a reed he can play on, and it sounds so much different than what he’s used to. He finds that his sound is richer and more like that which he hears on the recordings, and only amplifies his desire to play and to improve, so that he can one day play like the musicians he saw. He starts learning everything he hears, from movie soundtracks to pop melodies to concerto solos to solos for other instruments.

Shouyou’s little sister begins to catch on to his playing, too, and bugs him to play whenever she’s around. “Play that ‘bum-bum-bum-bah’ song again,” she would say, poking and pestering until he finally picks up his oboe and plays for her, and every time it makes him feel like he’s achieved something by playing for her. His audience of one is the only one he has to play for now, and he enjoys every second of it.

* * *

Through middle school, Koushi plays for competitions, and scores relatively well for the skill level he’s always told he plays at. He enters a Mozart competition as his first, and plays a song that’s so familiar to him that he can’t possibly mess it up with the pent of nerves of getting scored on his playing. The 12 Variations goes better than he expects it to, and scores about where he expects, at third. There are others there playing at a higher level, but that doesn’t bother him at all. It isn’t the skill and recognition that he plays for.

Daichi finds that he can’t make it to every competition, but Koushi always tells him he doesn’t mind. He’s supported his friend for so many years that the pianist can’t find a single reason to be upset that he misses a few of them, besides the fact that it’s lonelier without him there. The difficulty of his pieces gets higher, and so does his devotion to playing, but playing to nobody in particular still isn’t as motivating as it is to know that your notes are going to be heard by somebody who he knows will appreciate them. They both find that his scores are better when Daichi can make it to the performances.

Koushi finds that there is always somebody better when the scores are released, and though it didn’t use to bother him to see somebody elses name in first, after a time the repetition feels like plaster instead of routine. It isn’t long after that he tells Daichi that he won’t be doing competitions any more.

He learns and plays for competitions all through middle school and says at the end of their last year there that he’ll play one more, and when high school comes, they’ll all be behind him. to his surprise, when he walks out to play Mozart one last time and go out the same way he went in, the dim house lights reveal not only Daichi sitting where he always does, but also more of his friends and peers than he could ever hope to gather by himself. During intermission for judging he meets up with everybody who watched him perform, and above all, he cries surrounded by not only one, but a crowd of people who heard the heartfelt message of the revolving sun through piano keys.

In high school he continues to play for recitals and helps out in the chamber music group at Karasuno, where both he and Daichi decide to go because of rumors of the music program being stronger than it had been in years. They stick out the rehearsals and instruction and improve as musicians, but they also see the group begin to fall. What once held national-level musicians and concerts like those heard on recordings, becomes a club of hopeful first years and discouraged third years. It’s also the first year he performs in a suit.

* * *

* * *

Hinata continues through middle school always pushing for them to get an instrumental music program, and finding that no matter how much effort he puts into asking, nothing ever gets done. He’s told to join the choir group multiple times, and he declines. He stays in the choir practice room after school when it’s not being used and practices there with his portable CD player, and observes how the sound is different there than it is at home when he plays in his room.

He gets kicked out a couple times when the choir wants to rehearse, and he always asks to sit in and listen. The singers don’t mind having him there, and he learns more things about music while he’s there, things he can’t lean on his own, like how the singers interact with each other and how all of their voices need to mesh into one to become a solid sound that will sound good on stage.

He even asks for the recordings that they’re singing from and learns some of the parts, and when he comes in for their afternoon rehearsal one day he plays part of the accompaniment for them. Unfortunately for Hinata, the singers don’t appreciate his playing because they’re going to have a piano accompanist for the concert when it rolls around in a few months, so he leaves knowing that at least he has more practice under his belt.

At the same time that Hinata is getting kicked out of choir rehearsals, Suga is stuck leaning over the piano every day for club activities, sometimes by himself and sometimes by one or more people who’ve asked him to play with them. More often than not, he’s rehearsing with soloists and learning more sonata pieces than he ever thought possible. He’s lucky if he gets to practice his own parts.

It’s a big change for the pianist, who only ever used to prepare one or two pieces at a time and would be constantly performing. He prefers to stay back now and let others have the spotlight - he’ll take recognition where recognition is due, but he remains mostly in the background. It’s a big change for Daichi, as well, when he gets to the chamber music group and is asked to play in duets and quintets, and hits a wall when he’s made to play more flashy parts. Clarinet has always been the instrument that gets the melody lines, but he wouldn’t trade playing it for anybody else because it’s what he knows, and he learns how to get around his block.

Daichi begins to notice that Suga is using colorful plastic hair clips from when he was younger because his hair starts to grow out more, and so he gets him a pack of bobby pins to match, ones that won’t stand out so much. Through high school, Suga also begins to get more back pains from being bent over all the time, and with the strain of still growing he finds it’s best to stop every now and then to stretch, something which is new for him as well.

They also become better friends with the cellist that they met in their first year of high school, a timid boy who expresses everything he can’t say out loud through his music. He’s a gentle giant whose notes are louder than his voice, and he attracts a violinist who is exactly the opposite. Asahi and Nishinoya are drawn to each other on the first day- or more like Noya is drawn to Asahi. They’re also joined by Tanaka, the high strung flutist who aims to surpass every one of the upperclassmen. He’s the loudest flute player the others have ever heard, and though his ego can be large he’s developed it for a reason: his playing is strong and his words are stronger.

By the end of Suga’s second year, all five of them have become much closer. There were three other first years who had joined at the beginning of the year but dropped halfway through because despite everyone having a good time, the practices were still brutal. They go to the concert at the end of the year and promise to rejoin when the new school year starts, but after the trio performance, nobody is as sure as they thought they were about playing.

Though Hinata starts developing his own problems as he goes through middle school, he ignores most of them. He figures it’s standard for an oboist to get light headed as they play, and starts eating more before practicing so that he isn’t lacking energy. He starts keeping a water bottle on hand because his throat gets drier, and he dismisses his shoulder pain as being the price for perfect posture.

When Suga runs back with Kageyama into the practice room, he knows right away that it isn’t a problem with his posture or not eating enough that caused Hinata to faint. Suga would be lying if he were to say he hasn’t picked up on the fact that Hinata wears a binder to school and to rehearsals, he could see it in the way that Hinata carried himself and in the way he stretched just like Suga did himself. He rushed over to the oboist laying on the floor, still on his side, and breathing seemingly normal now.

Kageyama stands awkwardly to the side of the room, watching but not making any noise or trying to interrupt, because it seems to him that Suga knows what he’s doing. As Suga gently pulls Hinata to lay on his back and the smaller boy seems to be regaining consciousness, Kageyama thinks it best to go tell Daichi about what happened, and quietly excuses himself from the room.

Hinata slowly blinks awake, finding that both his head and the left side of his body are both sore, but nonetheless he brings an arm up to rub at his forehead. “Thank god you’re okay,” Suga says quietly as Hinata cringes at the pressure he’s putting on his own head, glances to the door to be sure that Kageyama closed it when he left, and sighs in relief.

“What happened?” Hinata says, rightfully confused after having woken up on the floor of the practice room. “Why is my oboe on the piano, I didn’t break it, did I? Did I pass out?” He slowly pushes himself off of the floor to sit up and look around, still dazed.

“Well, I don’t know about your oboe, but you did faint. It’s a good thing you fell to the side, too… I don’t know what could’ve happened if you’d hit your head on your music stand,” Suga says, pushing the stand farther away.

“Oh! Kageyama were playing the Danzi, right? Aw, I hope I didn’t break my reed.”

“Slow down,” Suga nearly laughed in exasperation, motioning for Hinata to stay sitting there when he sees the boy make a move to stand up. “I still need to talk to you about something.”

“What is it?”

“I need you to promise me you’ll be safer next time,” he begins, tapping his fingers on the ground in a way that makes him seem nervous. “I wear a binder to school, too, and I always make sure it’s not restricting me too much, and I take breaks because I know they’re important, and I always carry a sports bra with me just in case.”

“I see!” Hinata says, seemingly interested, or at least understanding what Suga is trying to say. “Yeah, I’ll be more careful, promise.”

Suga sighs again, standing up and reaching out a hand to help Hinata off of the floor, too. “I’ll make Daichi make sure there’s nothing wrong with your oboe. It looks like you’ll have to find another reed to use, though.”

“Aw, no fair,” he whines, walking over to take the split reed off of the oboe, cradling it in his hands like a tiny child. “It was so good.”

“I’m sorry. Also, go drink more water,” Suga stops him when he sees Hinata about to bound out of the door. When Hinata nods and then runs back to get his water bottle off of the floor, Suga realizes that he’s always going to worry about that little ball of musicality.

* * *

After Kageyama leaves the practice room, making sure to close the door securely behind him, he finds that half of the club is already standing in the main room with worried expressions littering their faces. He hadn’t realized how loud he’d been when he left to get Suga, and felt guilty now with Daichi, Ennoshita, Asahi, Noya, and Tanaka all watching him, probably looking for some sort of explanation.

“Suga-san is… taking care of it,” he says timidly, but at least the others seem a bit relieved by what he says.

“What happened?” Daichi asks when Kageyama walks over and sits in one of the main room seats.

“I’m not sure. He didn’t seem right as we played- he asked me to play something with him, and so we played this piece, and then he fainted. He’s probably going to come running in soon, honestly.”

The others all exchange looks, but none of them really know what to say in response; they trust Suga’s judgement, and can at least attest to how much energy Hinata seems to have, no matter the circumstance. Kageyama wishes he’d brought his cello out with him, at least then he could do something to take his mind off of what happened, especially knowing that nobody is going to leave until they’re sure Hinata is okay.

“Don’t worry about it,” Tanaka speaks up, sensing the unease and not finding it at all comfortable. “The kid’s all over the place. It’s not your fault.”

“I know that,” the cellist mumbles, shifting awkwardly in the chair. “I just feel like I should’ve done something. I just didn’t think he’d put playing before anything else.”

“Well, there’s no helping it,” Noya shrugs, leaning back against the grand piano where the other upperclassman are all standing.

As expected, it’s no more than a few seconds later that Hinata bounds in happily, erasing any doubt in everyone’s minds that he wouldn’t be fine. “Sorry to make you all worry,” he says as he bows to the upperclassman as Suga follows out behind him, the oboe in hand.

“Good to see you up and walking,” Noya jokes, and when Hinata straightens he beams, the overexcited mess.

Suga hands the oboe carefully to Daichi when he walks over, eyeing Hinata to make sure he isn’t already getting into more trouble. “Can you look this over for him? Make sure everything is alright?”

“I’m no oboe-expert, but I’ll do what I can,” he reassures them, then leaves for his things, where he’ll have the tools to make any minor adjustments he might need to. As everybody disperses back to their rooms, the threat of the day taken care of and a crisis thankfully avoided, the first years get back on each others’ cases and are already bickering, and Hinata with no instrument to play, stays back to watch Suga until Daichi returns.

“It should be fine,” he says as he hands the oboe back to its owner, who looks over it with starry eyes. “I just had to put a couple springs back that got jostled. Be careful, though, I’m no professional.”

“Thank you Daichi-san!” Hinata bows and is back in the practice room with Kageyama before the two third years can even blink. Once it’s back to the two of them, Daichi leans on the hood of the piano and let’s out a frustrated groan. “Do you really think he’ll be alright?”

Suga glances back at the practice room before laughing and continuing with his practicing, leaving Daichi to watch from over his music. “I’m sure he will be.”

* * *

Yamaguchi is blue. He is turquoise and the calm of small puddles on the side of the road, and the way the sky changes when there aren’t any clouds. Through everything, Yamaguchi has been the blue of harmony and wrinkled t-shirts and the covers of school books. When things go wrong, he is harsh waves and covered skies, hidden.

Tsukishima is yellow. He is the gold of superiority and streetlights when the lights go on and the only other illumination on the roads are the faded headlights of cars passing by, making dividing lines brighter and drivers unsure. Even the fluorescent hues of friendship seem to find space in him, and the teasing stops when he walks by.

Color palettes of reds and purples cannot compare to the mixing of green from pure shades of dimmed sunlight and undersea caverns. Their relationship ranges from dark seaweed flowing between passing fish and bottom feeders to the stronger tone of tree leaves and blades of grass that tickle the feet of neighbors walking through each others’ yards to ask for favors in their pajamas. Green is the color of nature and misfortune, of generosity and jealousy, of Yamaguchi and Tsukishima. Their hands hold tight like vines when they lay across the violinist’s bed, looking up at the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars they’d put up there when they were young and the fade marks from where two had fallen off.

“Do you think dinosaurs would have appreciated wifi?” Yamaguchi asks, looking down at his socked feet stacked on top of each other at the foot of the bed, and Tsukishima’s whose are crossed.

“Probably. They have big enough brains to appreciate it.”

“I guess that’s true.”

Their conversations commonly go like this, just small questions and discussions about topics that would seem pointless to anybody else, but the silence is not heavy, nor is it empty. It’s warm like cactus blossoms blooming from prickly green cacti, and not unwelcome.

“I’m still sorry about your bow…”

“I’ve already told you it doesn’t matter.”

“But it was-”

“Yeah, I know, it was _his_ , but it doesn’t matter. I don’t really care. It’s just a bow, and I got a new one that sounds exactly the same.”

“I’m still sorry, though.”

“...I know. It’s okay.”

And then they fall back into silence.

* * *

Ukai isn’t even in the general vicinity of being surprised when Takeda walks in on Friday night before he closes up. He wants to tell him to just shoo, that they’re closed, but the man looks so damn proud that he kind of wants to humor him for a little while. He crosses his arms and leans forward towards the counter as the teacher places what looks like a walkman in front of him. “The answer is going to be a no, but I’m curious. What’s that.”

“This,” Takeda starts with a confident grin, “is what’s going to convince you to come help the chamber music club.”

“This better not be a waste of my time,” he says with a sigh, taking off his apron and walking quietly to hang it up. “If you think listening to them is going to get me to come teach your kids, then have at it.”

When Ukai motions to the little CD player on the counter, Takeda presses the play button on the device and the little speakers attached to it start playing something like white noise for a moment, before the sound of a cello comes through. Ukai takes his seat back behind the counter to listen to the recording, not yet impressed. Sure, there’s a cello, but one cellist isn’t going to get him to try to teach  a bunch of high schoolers about music.

“Is this going to get interesting?” He asks with a raised a raised eyebrow, checking his watch.

“Shh, just listen,” Takeda responds, getting more and more exciting as the recording goes on; he’s anticipating something, Ukai can tell, but what he has no idea.

And then Hinata’s oboe playing starts.

“What the-” The clerk starts, but cuts himself off to listen.

“Two of my students agreed to do this recording for you, it’s a piece they’ve captivated a lot of people with,” Takeda says proudly, puffing up his chest, but Ukai hushes him, having not been paying attention. He was more concerned with the music on the track.

When the player stops and the recording ends, Ukai runs a hand back through his hair, eyeing the thing like it’ll give him some explanation for what he just heard, that duet that seems to captivate everyone who hears it.

“It’s Piazzolla’s Histoire Du Tango. The two of them, they’re odd, but they play that in front of crowds and they fall silent. It’s amazing.”

“These two are part of your group?” Takeda nods. “Why didn’t you tell me they were so good?”

Takeda feels like some sort of otherworldly force has struck him through the head, but he shakes it off. His club’s fate is on the line. “Please, will you come teach these kids? I don’t have any musical authority to help them, but they have so much potential, and they leave for their competition in Nekoma in a week.”

“Oh right,” he says distractedly, tapping on the counter. “You mentioned they’ll be at Nekoma.”

It’s quiet for a minute, nothing but the sound of birds outside and that rapping of the branch on the window. Takeda looks at him with a hopeful expression, just about ready to beg again when Ukai speaks.

“Yeah. Alright, I’ll help them.”

* * *

Kageyama likes music stores. There used to be a woman who would come in on the weekends and play at the piano inside, and the storekeeper would do his work with a smile those days and Kageyama would sit and listen for a while. She was nice, always offered to teach him a little if he could stay for a little longer, and helped him reach the music that was higher up on the shelves when everyone else was busy. Now that he’s old enough and tall enough to reach the music he needs, he finds he misses the pianist who would play.

He ends up in that music store on a Wednesday afternoon after rehearsal. With Ukai being their new instructor and helping everyone, a few things have been going differently over the past couple days. He spends a lot of time with Hinata, having been a wind player himself and finding that the oboist needs the help a little more than the others, but Kageyama will admit that Ukai has been helping him already, too. He hands out sightreading a lot, what he’s found to be at about the level of each of the musicians, and Kageyama has found himself unable to play some of it right away, mainly the double stops and fast jumps.

The reason he’s at the music store is because of Ukai. He’d suggested that Kageyama work on more solo work while all of the other chamber pieces come together, just personal practice pieces to learn and expand the list of pieces he’s able to play in case he ever needs to add to his repertoire, and apparently he told Asahi the same thing, because when he walks in, he sees the other cellist skimming over music.

“Asahi-san?” He calls as he walks over, and Asahi turns to face the first year who had called him.

“Kageyama? Let me guess, Ukai.”

“Yeah. You too?” Kageyama looks at the music in the upperclassman’s hands and recognizes it almost immediately. “Debussy. That’s a really good piece, it suits you.”

Asahi eyes it slowly, touching over the notes and looking unsure about it. “...Really?”

“Yeah. I leaned it a couple years ago- not that it matters or anything, it’s still a good piece for cellists to know.” Kageyama never seems to know how to talk to his upperclassmen, and usually feels awkward doing it, but Asahi seems like he feels the same, and in a way that makes him feel better.

“I’ve been thinking about playing it for a while, but… with Noya and Tanaka and Suga always wanting to play other things with me, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time.” The music closes with a soft pat and he looks over the cover. “It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve learned it already. You’re an amazing player, I could learn so many things from listening to you - and I mean that as a musician and another cellist.”

“I could… I could learn quite a bit from you, too. Everybody trusts you, even after what I heard about from last year.”

“Well,” Asahi says slowly, not knowing how to respond. “Give it time. They’ll warm up soon enough. I need to get going, but thank you. For your opinion on the piece, I mean.”

Kageyama doesn’t often seen Asahi smile, because he’s usually overcome with nerves or trying to deal with the two second years, but it’s one of the warmest smiles he’s ever seen. He remembers it as he hears the exchange at the register and as the front bell rings when the door opens, and sees it in slurs and ties across the page of music he’s watching, and can’t help but smile, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [jazz hands] next time we get the cats and the owls

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to find me outside of the fic, I'm most active on [twitter](https://twitter.com/sunlithero) nowadays, but I also have a [tumblr](http://autisticsurei.tumblr.com)!
> 
> IDK if I'm going to continue with this any more since I fell out of the fandom... jsyk


End file.
